The Terrace

Studio Terrace Creative Studio with Co-hosts Caitlin Henry and Sam Brooks
  • 5.0 (8)
  • Design

The Terrace is our corner of the internet for people who genuinely love their homes — or desperately want to. We're here to talk design, trends, beautiful things, and the real decisions you make when you're trying to build a space you actually want to live in. Think less design lecture, more wine with your most design-obsessed friends. Pull up a chair.

  1. Oct 7

    Your House Needs a Legend: The Art of Home Folklore

    This week on the Terrace, we're turning the hosting conversation inward. Instead of how to host beautifully once, we're talking about how to build the little rituals, symbols, and stories that repeat year after year until they simply become who you are. Call it home folklore. The best part? It costs nothing. We break home folklore into three parts: Traditions. The things you do again and again. Sam brings back the legendary Romantic Restaurant, where leftovers night becomes a candlelit menu, plus her signature cold coupe always waiting in the freezer. Caitlin shares Ross Soup on Halloween, Christmas Eve gifts, and pre-dinner dance parties to Celine Dion and Chattahoochee.Tangibles. Crests, monograms, embroidered napkins, custom matchbooks, a signature flower borrowed from Mom's garden, and whether every home deserves a name (spoiler: yes, and you don't need to live in Nantucket).Preservation. Hand-made scrapbooks, pressed wedding bouquets, illustrated venue drawings, digitized home videos, Storyworth, and a custom leather notebook for a little one on the way.Along the way, we swap flea market finds from Brimfield, Paris, and Mexico City, dig into the history of our own houses, and close with a round of Would You Rather: crest on everything or one delightfully strange tradition? The takeaway: you don't need generations of history to have home folklore. Pick one small thing tonight, decide it's a tradition, and let it grow. What's the one piece of folklore that's already yours? Tell us the story on Instagram @thestudio_terrace. Bonus points if it's a little strange. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the wine. 🍷

  2. Sep 23

    Stop Calling Everything Chic: Discernment and the Algorithm

    Pull up a chair, and maybe retire one word before you sit down. This week we're taking on design language fatigue: chic, elevated, curated, light and airy, and the whole overworked vocabulary of the interiors industry. It starts with toast being called chic and becomes a bigger question: is personal taste even possible right now, when the industry needs to sell at scale and the feed rewards whatever performs best? We define discernment (the practice of intentional editing: knowing what to include, what to remove, and why) and explain how a buzzword is born, from trend forecasting to buy plan to giant marketing campaign. Along the way we confess our own crimes, including three straight years of announcing that modern farmhouse was trending and a period of scrambling for new ways to say "rattan everywhere." We ask what a trend forecaster actually brings that Pinterest Predicts doesn't, why AI slop is now as much a buzzword as curated, and why taste may be the one thing the algorithm can't fake. We also defend trends, because a good buzzword can give someone the confidence to start. Then tell us about the piece in your home that nobody would ever put on a mood board but that is completely, unmistakably you. Find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and tell us all about it. No filters, no captions required, just the real reason. We want to see it all. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the tea this time, piping hot. ☕ Next week: home folklore. The rituals and traditions our homes carry, and how you can start building your own home lore to feel exactly like you.

  3. Sep 2

    The Rise of the Celebrity House Tour and Why We Can't Look Away

    Architectural Digest's Open Door has been a YouTube fixture for years and now that it's landed on Netflix, more people are watching it than ever. This is our deep dive on the show that turned house tours into appointment viewing: why it's having this exact moment, what the musician episodes all seem to have in common, and a close read of two of the most talked-about apartments this year — Emma Roberts's Los Angeles “grown-up dollhouse” and Maude Apatow's pink-wallpapered New York escape. We'll use all of it as a jumping-off point for why we love being so nosy when it comes to celebrity homes, and what it means for the future of interior design. Follow us on Instagram @TheStudio_Terrace and tell us your favorite Open Door episode, or which apartment philosophy you're living in — dollhouse, decompression chamber, or curated art gallery.

  4. Aug 26

    Room by Room: The Rooms We Forgot and What They Became

    There is a category of rooms in the home that nobody talks about when they're house shopping, nobody photographs for Instagram, nobody includes in the conversation about interior design — and that have quietly become some of the most interesting, most evolved, and most emotionally charged spaces in the modern home. The mudroom. The laundry room. The butler's pantry. The entryway. The hallway. The pantry. These are the rooms that make daily life either completely manageable or absolutely chaotic. They are the rooms that reveal how a household actually runs — more honestly than any living room vignette ever could. And in the last decade, they have had an extraordinary glow-up: designed, considered, beautiful in their own right, and finally treated as worthy of the same design intention as every other room. This is the finale of the room-by-room series, and Caitlin and Sam are going out with a celebration of the rooms that don't get celebrated enough. They dig into what these rooms used to be, what they've become, and why investing in the spaces most people ignore might be the most transformative thing you can do for your home. We want to see your forgotten rooms. The mudroom you're proud of. The laundry room with the wallpaper. The entryway that finally got a proper light fixture. The pantry you could live in. Come find us on Instagram at TheStudio_Terrace and show us everything!

  5. Aug 19

    Room by Room: The Accidental Office

    The home office barely existed in residential design fifteen years ago — then the pandemic forced everyone to improvise one overnight, and it’s only now starting to get done properly. Caitlin and Sam trace the room’s evolution from the men’s study and the kitchen bill-paying desk to the pandemic-era standing-desk boom, and confess that neither of their own ‘offices’ is purely an office — one moonlights as a guest room, the other doubles as pastel-colored therapy. They get into Zoom background etiquette, the enduring ugliness of ergonomic furniture, a Hilary Duff eggplant-office throwback, and where the room goes next as some homes go all-in on a dedicated office and others get crafty with corners and closets. We want to see where you actually work! The real workspace, the improvised, the chaotic. Come find us on Instagram at @thestudio_terrace and show us your setups. We want to see all of it. Next week is our final episode in the Room by Room series — it blew right by, and it’s one we're been really excited about. We’re talking about the rooms nobody thinks about: the mudroom, the laundry room, the butler’s pantry, the entryway, the foyer — the rooms that have quietly had the most interesting glow-up of any room in the house. We'll see you back on the Terrace very soon. Don't forget the wine. xoxo

  6. Aug 5

    Room by Room: The Bathroom Glow up

    The bathroom has had the biggest glow-up in recent home design history — from a utility closet with plumbing to the room everyone wants to live in. Caitlin and Sam trace how the primary ensuite exploded during the '80s and '90s McMansion boom, why showers are quietly winning the tub-vs-shower war, and why the guest powder room is still the one room where anyone's allowed to have fun. They get into tile-mixing nostalgia, the unglamorous truth about grout color, the freestanding-tub fantasy versus its real-life function, and the eternal glass-door-vs-shower-curtain debate (verdict: steal a window curtain). Plus: Caitlin's almost-purchase of a milky mint-green pedestal sink, her new house's questionable-but-beloved mauve jacuzzi tub, and a hard-won ranking of Euro bathroom quirks — bidets included. We want to hear your bathroom situation — dream versus reality. The tile you wish you'd chosen. The tub you've actually never used. The upgrade that genuinely changed your life. Come find us on Instagram at @thestudio_terrace and tell us everything.

  7. Jul 22

    Room by Room: The Bedroom - Get Back in Bed, We Need to Talk

    The Most Personal Room. The Longest Gap Between Reality and the Dream. You know this room. It's the one you think about constantly and somehow always leave for last. The linen duvet situation you haven't resolved. The headboard you've been meaning to change for three years. The nightstand that started as a temporary solution and has now officially outlived two relationships and a move. The bedroom is the most personal room in the house — and somehow the one most people have the widest gap between reality and the dream. This week, Caitlin and Sam head into the room by room series and go somewhere private. They trace the bedroom from its origins as the opulent "bed chamber" through the great beige takeover, into the Gen Z era of full-time bed rotting, and out the other side into the luxury wellness retreat we're all apparently building now. They get into the nightstand as altar, the eternal chase for the hotel bedroom, the great pillow debate, and the wellness routines that have earned a hard yes versus a very firm no. There are sconces. There are Costco sheets. There is a Kindle case that says "Smut Illustrated." This is not a drill. We want to know what your bedroom actually looks like. The real version — not the aspirational one. And we want to know the one change that would make the biggest difference. The nightstand situation. The headboard you've been avoiding. The sheets you've been meaning to upgrade for two years. Come find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and tell us. Drop it in the comments or DMs — this is a conversation worth having, and we will read every single one. And if this episode finally gave you permission to invest in the room you spend a third of your life in — good. That's exactly what it was for. Next week we're heading to the bathroom and the glow-up it's had in the last fifteen years. Spa culture, soaking tubs, tile situations. We basically already started. As always — don't forget to bring the wine.

  8. Jul 15

    The Anti-Staging Movement: Do You Even Live Here?

    Something is shifting. After more than a decade of homes being optimized for photography — staged for the grid, flattened into aspirational backdrops, stripped of anything too personal or too specific — there is a quiet, growing rebellion underway. Heirlooms are back on the shelf. Travel finds are on the credenza. The things that actually mean something are being put out instead of hidden. The anti-staging movement is not a trend in the traditional sense. It's a values shift — away from the show home and toward the lived-in home, away from the universally photogenic and toward the deeply personal. It is the home as biography rather than the home as brand. Caitlin and Sam dig into what anti-staging actually means, why it's happening now, what it looks like in practice, and — critically — how you tell the difference between a home that is authentically personal and one that is performing authenticity. Because the risk, of course, is that "lived-in" becomes its own aesthetic. Its own stage. Show us the thing you'd never stage — the piece with a story, the corner that's actually yours. Find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and show us the real one. We want to see it all. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the wine. 🍷

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

The Terrace is our corner of the internet for people who genuinely love their homes — or desperately want to. We're here to talk design, trends, beautiful things, and the real decisions you make when you're trying to build a space you actually want to live in. Think less design lecture, more wine with your most design-obsessed friends. Pull up a chair.

Information

  • Creator
    Studio Terrace Creative Studio with Co-hosts Caitlin Henry and Sam Brooks
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Studio Terrace Creative Studio with Co-hosts Caitlin Henry and Sam Brooks