Tiffany Howell
A decade ago – after a cinematic career spanning the roles of music video producer-director, documentarian, and set designer – Tiffany Howell more or less devoted herself to interior design. She founded the LA-based firm Night Palm in 2016, where she draws on fashion, cinema, and music to conjure an emotive style that often has the look and air of California via Italy circa the 1970s.
Howell’s rooms are intentionally built for the main characters in us all, and they hold a mood like a piece of poetry – so it’s unsurprising that she pulls together a lot of playlists and pens a lot of poems in her process. Below, Howell chats with journalist Chantel Tattoli about the intimacy of furniture and finding feeling within a space.
“There are arguments, there are naps, there are dreams, there are dance parties! Your home is holding you during it all, and I literally try to hold space for that when I think about the pieces I put into people’s homes.”
Hold the room
Playlists, poetry, and the emotional life of a room – inside Tiffany Howell’s practice of feeling first.
Chantel Tattoli: Please, I wish to hear about these playlists.
Tiffany Howell: I start at foundational talking points with my clients. My musicians, my directors, or my actors – really pretty much all my clients – appreciate leaning into the feeling first, before leaning into the visual. It’s so much more relatable and understandable for me to say to them, “I want your home to feel like a Sade song.” And they say, “Oh, my god – that’s exactly what I want it to feel like.” Because if you show imagery, often we don’t even know why we like it. A client might respond to how the light in an image is streaming in, but you would never have a couch like that, you know? They're responding to the light, not the furniture.
CT: Whereas music goes right to mood. So, you’re typically both contributing songs, dialing in? The playlists are for both of you?
TH: It’s for both of us. I’ll have songs, clients will have songs, or they make a whole playlist. We find the feelings, and then I build from that place.
CT: Emotion is your entryway, then. And your physical interiors follow from people’s interior lives.
TH: Yes! And I’m also so interested in the subconscious influence on people of how a paint color can make you feel, how the shape of something can make you feel. There’s an emotional scape, you know?
CT: Can the designing also be script-like? Meaning, it’s as if the occupants are inhabiting a scene, an imagined setup?
TH: I have a project called “Hemingway's Mistress,” for example, where I was asking myself, “Who would have a dinner party here? How would he live here? How would she live here?” I really love the underlying story of a space, and not just from a cinematic lens. I am truly invested in how the house is going to be lived in after me.
CT: In your recent conversation with the painter Danielle McKinney, you spoke to how much you admire the quietness in the scenes she renders. There’s a stillness that betrays a fullness. Someone is there. They sleep there. They’re almost englobed.
TH: Danielle is my favorite artist. She creates sanctuaries. Her idea of feeling totally at ease and safe in a space is the biggest end goal that I think I could give somebody as a client. Because it’s a really crazy world out there.
CT: Relatedly, I’d love to talk about how we kind of throw around the word “furniture.” We’ll say something or someone is “part of the furniture.” A fixture. You forget they’re there. And that tracks, but it also doesn’t when you start to think about the role of furniture. There’s great intimacy since we’re living literally on or beside these things, right?
TH: Oh, my god, yes. There are arguments, there are naps, there are dreams, there are dance parties! Your home is holding you during it all, and I literally try to hold space for that when I think about the pieces I put into people’s homes.
CT: It’s kind of like furniture becomes emotionally stained by us, along with the physical patina that happens over time, over life.
TH: It’s one of the reasons I buy mostly vintage if I can or make something myself.
CT: Relatedly, while designing the Poet Sofa – your collab with Australian brand ELLISON STUDIOS. – you even penned a poem.
TH: That poem wasn’t a departure from my norm. I often use poetry as a foundational thing. I’ll say, “I want your home to feel like this poem, you know, like these Leonard Cohen lyrics.” It’s like spell-casting or something! Everyone on my team will probably tell you the words I use too much are “lush” and “poetic.” And I write a lot of poetry, yes.
CT: Your poem to the Poet Sofa includes lines about “wine stains and phantom limbs,” about the “unfolding of our life, held there, where we become us again and again.” I read it and thought about a Louise Glück poem titled “Fantasy.” In it, a woman who has just lost her husband is receiving people at their home after his funeral: “The widow sits on the couch, very stately, so people line up to approach her, sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.”
And as we learn, she doesn’t want to be there. She’d rather be back at the cemetery or the hospital. But she’s on their couch, and this is happening to her.
TH: It’s literally holding her. This is what I meant about how your home holds you.
CT: It can be quite tender, of course. I’m thinking now about the couch my husband had before I arrived on the scene. I hated that couch! But because I was sitting on it when I received the call that my sibling had passed away, it was oddly hard to get rid of later. The couch was with me in that moment: I’d wailed on it, punched it – sobbed into it. Almost trauma-bonded with it. It’s like our furniture participates in our lives in a way that can defy its inert object-ness; like the intimacy can cause some sort of emotional anthropomorphism. It’s something that I think you’re quite attuned to?
TH: Oh, yes. Yes – and I’m so sorry – this is the heart of it, you’re right.
CT: How do you make sure your rooms or spaces are accountable to the people who live, laugh, love, yawn, cry, and create?
TH: You know, a lot of my job and specialty, I think, as a designer is creating spaces for other creatives to feel inspired in. So they can dial in and do their thing.
CT: With regard to lighting – are there specific typologies you’re just really fond of? I‘ve noticed a lot of amazing sconces in your work.
TH: Yes, they’re just really like on point. They keep the light at a certain height. Some of my most major design advice to anyone is, first off, paint a room the right color. It’ll become a fully different room for not much money at all. And then add a beautiful sconce. It will elevate the room so much.
CT: Both color and light are such potentially emotional interventions.
TH: I think color and lighting are definitely the things that I regard as most important, because we are so emotionally affected by those two things.
CT: What’s an example of your reasoning for landing on a certain shade?
TH: I’m looking at my client’s skin tone. I’ll hold up paint to their skin. I want everyone to look beautiful in their home and feel beautiful in their home and to look at their kids or their mate or their art or whatever and just be like, “WOW.” I play with that. I probably bleed Farrow & Ball's “Dead Salmon.” I love that color so, so much!
CT: In terms of where your interiors feel set, where they almost seem to hail or hearken from, I think I pick up on California and Italy again and again.
TH: That’s right. I was born and raised in California. California is my hippie spiritual roots. I use its sunsets as a lot of my tones and palettes, as well as the glam, but also the grit of older Hollywood. And then I wish to be in the ’70s with YSL in Italy. Or there in the 17th century. Italy brings an artisanal quality.
CT: These are definitely your tandem pole stars.
TH: I’m a Gemini! It’s kind of these two dueling worlds, and I’m trying to bridge them, to fly between them. I love the furniture that was coming out of Europe in the ’70s and ’80s. Very sculptural, lots of volume. The woodwork. The patina. But also, like, the chrome. I want the alchemy of different
soulful materials – all of it at once. There are one-size-fits-all designers, many of whom are great – they’re killing it. But I want to use the whole toolkit.
CT: That it’s own challenge, no? You’re only as good as the obscurity of your references, as they say.
TH: Can I tell you that’s one of my favorite phrases? And I’m really struggling with that right now, because it’s hard – with all this information forced on us, and the oversaturation of images and references. But I’m trying to focus on the bigger picture, trying to create something that looks – but also
feels – deeply right.
