Somewhere Between Joey and Rose

I didn't get to know my father.

He died when I was very young. What I have of him are the stories I grew up with. Joey loved music. He had style. He was a bohemian, the kind of person who marched to the beat of his own drum and didn't seem to need anyone's permission to do it.

My mother, Rose, I grew up with. She has an eye for beauty, for style, for the unexpected. She could take found things, things that didn't come from the same place or the same decade, and bring them together until they belonged.

This studio is named for both of them. Joey Rose. Somewhere between those two people, an instinct got passed down to me.

Knowing someone through stories

There's something I've realized about the way I know my father, and it connects to everything I do now.

I know him the way you know an old object. Through provenance. Through what other people tell you about where it's been and what it meant. I can't sit across from him. But I can piece together a person from the stories.

That's what vintage is, in a way. You find a chair, and it can't tell you its life, but you can feel that it had one. The wear on the arms. The repairs someone made. The fact that someone cared enough to keep it this long. You build a picture of where it's been.

Maybe that's why old things have always moved me. They're the closest thing to meeting someone you missed.

What Rose gave me

My mother was a young adult in the 1980s, in her twenties and thirties. That decade shaped her taste and, through her, it shaped mine.

She has great interior style. She loves art. She always had cool abstract art pieces in our home, things that didn't explain themselves, that you had to just look at for a while.

I grew up around that. A room, to me, was always a place where something surprising might be on the wall. Where beauty didn't have to be pretty or obvious. Where things you found could sit next to each other and make sense in a way that no catalog would have suggested.

My love of the 1980s, the lacquer and gold and glamour and drama, comes straight from her. So does the instinct to mix rather than match.

What Joey gave me

What I got from my father is harder to point to, because I didn't get to watch him.

But I think it's the permission. The bohemian part. The idea that you can live by your own rhythm and make choices that don't make sense to everyone. That a home doesn't have to look like the other homes. That your taste is allowed to be strange.

And music. My father loved music, and I like to think of a good room as a kind of composition. Things in conversation. A rhythm of color and shape. Something a little off-beat that makes the whole thing swing.

The instinct

So what is it, exactly, that got passed down?

Notice things. Keep the interesting thing. Mix rather than match. Understand that beauty doesn't have to be new, or perfect, or particularly well behaved.

That's the instinct. That's what I bring into every room and every hunt. When I'm out at a thrift store or an estate sale and something stops me, a strange lamp, a plaid couch, a piggy bank I had no intention of buying, that's Joey and Rose, together, saying look at that.

Why a studio and not just a style

I could have kept this to myself. Plenty of people have a good eye and just use it on their own homes.

But I love giving people something they want, especially when it's something they didn't know existed. I love being part of beauty. And I wanted to build something that carried the instinct forward, not just in my house, but in other people's.

So Joey Rose is a Los Angeles interior styling and personal vintage sourcing studio. We work with what people already own. We edit and rearrange rooms. We go into the world, the thrift stores, the estate sales, the flea markets, the places you only find by taking a wrong turn, and we hunt for furniture, lighting, art and objects with character. We make rooms that have a point of view.

It's work, and it's also, quietly, a way of keeping two people close.

Somewhere between

I think about the name a lot. Not Joey and Rose. Joey Rose. As if they're one person.

In a way they are, in me. A father I know through stories and a mother I know through everything she ever hung on a wall. A bohemian who marched to his own drum and a woman who could make anything belong.

Every room I touch is somewhere between the two of them. I hope you can feel it.