I am the one who bought all of it

Most furnishing advice online is written by people who have never had a guest email them at eleven at night about a lamp. I have. Six times over, across six houses in and around Fayetteville, West Virginia, at the edge of the New River Gorge.

I moved here in 2013 and started hosting in 2018. Since then the houses have taken in more than five hundred five-star reviews, and I have replaced enough sofas, mattresses, blackout curtains and coffee makers to know which decisions were worth the money and which ones I would take back.

This site is the receipts. Not a mood board.

Before the rentals

I ran an interior design blog, owned a breakfast-and-coffee restaurant, and built websites for other people. That mix turns out to be exactly the right training for this: design taste, an operator's tolerance for detail, and enough marketing background to know that a beautiful room nobody books is a hobby.

What you will find here

Every piece of furniture, lighting, textile and paint colour that is currently in one of my houses, listed by room and by house, on the shop pages. What the whole thing cost, honestly, on What It Costs. And the systems I use to actually run the places — turnovers, guest messages, welcome books — as templates you can use instead of writing your own.

There is also a free checklist of the sixty-one things a guest bedroom needs, which is the fastest way to see whether the rest of this is any use to you.

How I make money, plainly

Some links here earn a commission, and I sell my own templates. Both are set out on the disclosure page. Nobody pays me for placement, and nothing goes on a shop page that I did not buy and use.

Getting in touch

If you are furnishing something and stuck on a specific decision, write to me. I answer these, and the good questions usually turn into a page on this site. Contact me here.