Issue No. 1

We're a married couple with an eye for interior design and a desire for our home to actually feel like us: elevated, curated, and a genuine reflection of who we are.

After getting married in 2018, we spent years going to open houses, getting outbid, and coming to terms with the gap between the home we could afford and the home we wanted. We finally bought our first place in 2021: a 1938 craftsman bungalow in the San Fernando Valley. It was, generously speaking, a time capsule. The living room had floor-to-ceiling raw wood paneling that gave full log cabin energy, and a powder room where, if you were sitting on the toilet, your feet were also in the shower. We saw the potential.

Having never renovated anything before, we took it down to the studs and started over. We didn't hire a designer because we wanted every dollar to go into the home. What followed was expensive, stressful, and overwhelming — a million micro-decisions about things we'd never once considered. How high should the kitchen outlets be? Towel bar or towel ring? Left-hand or right-hand toilet flusher? But when we finally moved in, we couldn't believe it was ours.

Then, we got pregnant with our second child, and that bungalow that had felt just right suddenly felt very cramped, and we were back at it! This time, we needed an architect so we could build an addition onto the current home: adding a primary bedroom, bathroom, and closet. But, we still didn't hire a designer or decorator. We thought that surely, having just done this, the decor would be the easy part. Hard lesson: it is never easy.

Then, as fate would have it, a series of life events led us to sell that bungalow in 2025. When we sold, we made a healthy profit — proof that a well-designed home is worth the effort. Our next chapter would be moving into another home that — you guessed it — needed another full renovation.

Three major renovations in four years. No prior experience. Just sheer willpower, an eye for design, and a stubborn refusal to let our home be anything other than exactly what we wanted. We somehow made it out the other side with our sanity and our marriage intact.

Three renovations in, we got deeply frustrated with the lack of useful resources for people like us. Everything we found fell into one of two lanes: Architectural Digest-level homes shaped by the world's top designers or a race-to-the-bottom influencer culture of Amazon swaps for high-end pieces. Neither aligned with us or with the reality of our home.

For us, we fell somewhere in between those 2 lanes. The celebrity Architectural Digest homes are incredible to look at, but impossible to attain on our current budget - how does one even commission and bespoke chandelier? And on the other end, we're not trying to furnish our house from the clearance aisle either. We want to spend real money on nice things, and certainly don't want a home full of cheap, generic junk.

So we built the resource we wished had existed. Trove is your interior design cheat-sheet. A place to find handpicked furniture, decor, paint colors, and accessories across a wide range of styles; plus we share the real talk on renovating: the tips, the horror stories, the lessons we learned the hard way. We'll show you the kind of beautiful, aspirational interiors you'd find in Architectural Digest - and then actually tell you how to get there within your budget.

That's the gap Trove exists to fill. We're glad you're here.

Until next time,