Never Not Renovating

Welcome to my design and renovation newsletter, My Printed Life.

Over the past few months and weeks and days I have really been missing Bird. Always missing the beautiful clothes of course, but more significantly missing the people and places that made up the Bird community. The brilliant people that worked at Bird, our incredible clients, generous neighbors, fellow small Brooklyn businesses, and all the wonderfully talented designers and collaborators. I miss having spaces to come together and celebrate the good times and big milestones, spaces where we ran into friends and made new ones, spaces where we could gather to console one another and lift each other up through challenging times. I miss having our platform and daily dialogs to advocate for and amplify the social causes we cared most deeply about. I feel the need for collective social gathering and action now more than ever.

I have spent the past few years slowly transitioning my work and my life from closing Bird, becoming a twin mom, and moving to Sweden. I have been putting the pieces together of a new professional identity as an interior designer. You can see more of that on my new Jen Mankins Interiors website. Many years of working in fashion as a retailer, merchant, buyer, editor, and curator, has forever shaped my sense of style and place and helped me to define my ideas about beauty, craftmanship, joy and design. I hope you will follow along with me on my journey of creating new design projects as they develop.

I am launching this newsletter here, because I hope to build a new base for our community to come together to share ideas and information and support each other as we did for so many years at Bird. One of my very first forays into writing about design was writing a weekly blog for 23 weeks for Brownstoner in 2008 about the renovation project I was doing to build the Bird flagship store in Williamsburg. That construction project went on to receive the coveted LEED-CI Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the first retail establishment to receive this designation in New York. That feels SO LONG AGO. Fast forward almost twenty years and here we are. I look forward to bringing you along as I delve into new work as well as being able to share with you the resources I discover along the way. I also plan to share loads of renovation ideas and details, shopping guides, and travel guides, and the many things I still find inspiring all over the world. But since I am new here all of this will be rolling out slowly. Teaching an old dog new tricks as they say.

I’m so grateful for my family and friends, colleagues and complete strangers that have supported me and believed in me and enabled me to build everything I have and shaped who I am now and make possible the new work I am creating. Thank you. I love you. And until I can see your gorgeous faces in person and give you a giant smile and a squeeze, I will be here for you and am looking forward to hearing from you; what you are curious about, what you are working on and how I might help you along your path.

That’s it for today. I am glad you are here.

Onwards,

Jen