Portland may be famous for its dining scene, its rich panoply of cultural offerings, and all the outdoors activities any body could master. But the locals know that richest part of living here is simply being at home.

With our new e-newsletter and blog, At Home, we want to celebrate—and help you savor—the Portland good life through design, décor, food and drink, entertaining, and gardening. And so we found two of the best guides the city has to offer, Amara Holstein and Teri Gelber, while reintroducing our longtime garden writer, Kate Bryant.

During her past decade as a design and architecture writer and editor, Amara Holstein has found herself driving hours on rutted roads, clambering up ladders through construction sites, and shuffling through thousands of floor tile samples—all in search of a good story. Yet she can’t seem to leave work behind, and at the end of the day, she still yearns to snuggle up with a cup of tea and a hefty architectural monograph. She’s currently a contributing editor at Dwell, and has published stories in Sunset, FRAME, Wallpaper, GOOD, and VIA magazines.

After college and exploiting Berkeley for every fruit, vegetable, and flea market, Teri Gelber took off for Paris and Rome. Back home in LA, her love of art, design, cooking, and music coincided with odd jobs from propmaster to yoga teacher to cheesemonger. Cookbook writing and producing public radio took up much of her time before she moved to one of America’s last civilized cities (Portland) to raise her son and pursue domestic bliss.

Kate Bryant writes about plants and also gets pretty physical with them in her professional gardening work. She particularly enjoys snipping shrubbery into topiary art (although she rarely has the opportunity to do so). Since she fancies herself a bit of a cook, plants she can eat are often on her mind. Current contenders for favorite plants include resinous, sticky plants, plants that resent summer water, and parsley.

The far greater resource for enjoying the Portland home life, of course, is you. So we hope you’ll share your homes, décor and entertaining ideas, recipes, and gardening tips by commenting on our blog or by dropping us an e-mail so that we can consider your ideas for publication.

Enjoy.

Randy Gragg
Editor in Chief
Portland Monthly