Sleep, Eat, Party, Repeat

Wherever hostess extraordinaire Rebecca Gardner goes, good times follow. Her New York City pied-à-terre is no different.

- Kate Bolick

The day is Thursday, maybe Friday, in Manhattan, and it's early evening. Late summer, sultry. The week before, your phone had pinged with a text invite to a cocktail party at Rebecca Gardner's Greenwich Village apartment. You'd only met her once, on an airplane. But the way she'd made that chance encounter sparkle inspired you to cut off work early and be here now, pulling open an ornate gold door on Fifth Avenue. That the 15-story prewar building began life as a hotel is fitting. Gardner is hospitality incarnate.

This welcoming spirit is why, just over a decade ago, at the age of barely 30, Gardner founded Houses & Parties, an events and interior design collective dedicated to her two greatest passions. Indeed, she so missed hosting during the pandemic that she added an e-commerce arm to her website, stocking it with anything "devotees of the elegant and unusual" might need for entertaining (and then some-as she likes to say, "I specialize in nonessentials"). When Gardner isn't overseeing her 10-person firm and warehouse from her spacious home base in Savannah, Georgia, she's here at her "teeny" pied-à-terre near Washington Square Park, staging parties for clients, or just for herself.