1999. The NASDAQ set new highs. Nokia introduced a cell phone with games and picture texting. AOL’s free CD’s made the Internet the hottest thing.
In Manhattan, a young couple had just gotten engaged, bought their first house, and quit their jobs in finance to start a business together. They didn’t know much about business, but they loved going to Europe and the gracious, Old World style of entertaining they experienced there. They thought maybe other people would like it too, so they called their little company “Gracious Style.”
It was slow going for a while. Luxury brands back then believed they should be exclusive. You were either born into the Upper East Side and shopped at the right places, or they didn’t want you as their customer. But gradually, we convinced them, one by one, that the internet wasn’t a bad thing and wasn’t going away, and we had a unique way of showcasing them online to a wider audience. Along the way, we also learned a lot more about design, through our travels, through working with some of the top talents in the industry, and through renovating and building about a dozen houses ourselves.
Sixteen years and two major recessions later, after many bigger and flashier companies have come and gone, we’ve grown quietly and steadily. Today Gracious Style works with just about all the major luxury brands in home entertaining. We’re also older now, and increasingly we’re helping the next generation start their life of entertaining together.
A big issue we face is how that older, gracious style of entertaining we love fits in. Where do 200-year-old china patterns used by the royal families of Europe fit with today’s hyper-connected, social, mobile, texting Millenials? Should they be relegated to display cabinets and brought out once a year? Or should we just put them in museums and be done with it?
We don’t think so.
In fact, we believe that gracious entertaining is even more important now than when we started. More than ever, we need to hit pause and live in the moment. We need permanence and history in a world that changes too fast. We need to savor our foods, talk with our loved ones, and nestle in our beds. What we do is not just for private jets, yachts, and second-/third-/fourth homes. It is also for the young couple sharing a loft downtown. It’s for the executive whose daily quiet moment is her morning cup of chamomile. It’s for the architect who celebrates his kimchi tacos with all the fanfare of The French Laundry.
We’re not the only ones who believe this. We’re inspired by — and validated by — the restaurants that are making honest, locally grown food, by resorts like Blackberry Farm and the Aman that take us back to nature, and by the thousands of creative young people who are taking back the old inner cities of Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and even Detroit. Even though we work with the some of the oldest luxury brands in the world, we feel a kinship with those young, creative people, and we want to make what we do meaningful to them.
So, today we started a partnership with a couple of these young, creative people. Meet Josh and Aaron of The VHF:
They work out of an old Coke bottling warehouse in Venice, where they churn out amazing work for swimwear manufacturers, game companies, and musicians (hey, this is LA):
And what we’ve asked them to do is help us make gracious entertaining relevant to a whole new generation:
Looks like they’ve got their work cut out for them. Stay tuned!