New York’s ultimate host on how to throw the perfect party
Entertaining expert Lauren Santo Domingo says its time to rethink what makes a great party.
Once, when she was younger, Lauren Santo Domingo, had a dinner party that wasn’t quite right. Well, actually it was perfect. Which was the problem. “When I started entertaining at home, I was really following the model of a lot of these Upper East Side women, women from Connecticut where I grew up, or incredible hostesses in Europe at houses I was lucky enough to be invited to. And I think when I started having my own dinner parties, I really tried to replicate that formula and felt I had to copy them and do that,” says Santo Domingo, who in addition to being the co-founder and chief brand officer of luxury fashion retailer Moda Operandi, was this year appointed artistic director of Tiffany & Co.’s home category.
“I remember one of the first dinner parties I had in New York,” she says. “My family had moved into a house in Gramercy Park, and we were sitting around the dining table and everything was perfect and we were being served our dinner. And all of a sudden, I just had this moment where I thought, ‘This is not me. This is not who we are. I’m too young to be doing this’.
“By the time dessert came, I said, ‘Everyone, we’ll have dessert in the living room. We’ll eat on our laps.’ I just felt I needed to take it down a notch. I think that was the moment when I realised I really need to find a style that suits me, that suits who I am and the people I’m inviting into my house and how I live and how I want people to feel.”
It’s an ethos Santo Domingo is bringing to her appointment at Tiffany & Co. As a long-time American Vogue contributor, celebrated host and sought-after guest, with homes around the world, Santo Domingo is known for her taste, while Tiffany has been the go-to for gifts for occasions of note for nearly 200 years.
Rummaging through Tiffany & Co.’s vast archives, which include the work of design luminaries such as Jean Schlumberger, Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso, who have all left their legendary mark on the brand, has been a great source of pleasure for Santo Domingo. “I feel my own personal aesthetic is always very much rooted in the past, in heritage, in tradition,” she says. “Of course, I always like to look forward and I like modernity, but it really is the past that informs my personal style and my personal aesthetic. So it felt very natural. Tiffany has an incredible, incredible archive, a vast repertoire of styles, decades, generations, motifs.”
Santo Domingo’s first collections for Tiffany & Co., released in time for the opening of its impressive Landmark flagship in New York in April, reimagined classic prints such as Tiffany Berries, Tiffany T True and Tiffany Toile in colours that reflected the gemstones used in its jewellery creations. Santo Domingo says that walking through the sixth floor of the Landmark, where the home division sits, remains a joy (“I went in the other day and the team had taken an Elsa Peretti bone cuff and used it as a napkin ring, and I thought it was the cleverest thing. I never would have thought to do it myself.”) Another thing that takes Tiffany’s heritage and reinvents it is the just-launched Crest collection. For this, Santo Domingo created, in a way, a coat of arms for Tiffany, incorporating instantly recognisable motifs and collections such as The Bird on a Rock and a nod to the Return to Tiffany collection.
The idea for Crest came from her obsession with collecting 17th and 18th century armorial china. She is a life-long magpie. “I collect everything,” she says. “No matter where I’m going. If I’m going to a destination wedding, without fail the next morning I am at the local market. I’m always searching antique stores, consignment stores, the Salvation Army, auction houses. Some people play golf or tennis on the weekends. Me, I like to just go look for beautiful things.”
Santo Domingo collects to build full sets of things such as crockery, saving some that are in their “infancy” until a collection is more well rounded. But mostly she uses all of her treasures. “Whether it’s my coffee in the morning or the cups I’m putting my toothbrush in, I just love that every object has some sort of personal meaning, or that I’ve collected and found them along the way.”
New Tiffany & Co. home collections will be spliced with limited-edition drops and she has plans for collaborations with her many fashion friends. Each piece, from tableware, silverware, barware and more, is intended to form part of someone’s own personal collection. It’s meant to be built on, mixed and matched, and intended to appeal as much to the younger, cooler set as to those who might still dress for dinner.
“I do feel it’s important that we have that balance,” she says. “Having Tiffany as a brand informing everything that we do, we’re so lucky to have such authority and such heritage that we can really look at something and be like, ‘Okay, this is Tiffany, or it’s not’.”
Still, it was essential to Santo Domingo that the collections be ‘foolproof’. While some of them may be formal, they’re entirely free of fustiness.
“When I think of the customer, I really put myself in the position of, ‘What do I want? What am I looking for?’ Being someone who entertains often, casually, formally, I’m always looking for fool-proofness. I like to take the guesswork out. I like to be confident that anything that I may choose from the collection will be elegant, sophisticated and timeless, and that there’s just no room for error.”
This also fits with the way Santo Domingo sees laying a sensational table – for her it’s less about adhering to etiquette around such things as which fork goes where as it is about expressing personal style.
“The idea of being a very domesticated woman never really appealed to me,” she says. “It wasn’t until I matured that I realised that the domain of the table, of entertaining, is not only for women. I probably have more conversations on this subject with men as I do with women. But I think [it’s about] understanding that it’s a creative pursuit. And in the same way that when one is entertaining, maybe it’s cooking and you’re showing your love through the food you’re presenting. Myself, I cannot cook, so I am showing my love and welcoming you into my home by laying a table.
“I think a lot of the ideas of ‘etiquette’ have been removed a bit, or at least I hope that they have, and it feels like this new tabletop movement is much more about creativity and about gatherings and creating memories.”
Inspiration for her own tables comes from many places, including the most exquisite hosts, such as the famed philanthropist and society doyenne, Deeda Blair.
“I had lunch once with Deeda Blair, and she’d matched the smell of the mint on the salad to the smell of the gardenia in the centrepiece when the dessert was served,” says Santo Domingo. “I mean, she really was this legendary hostess. Women like my mother-in-law, Beatrice Santo Domingo, and Annette de la Renta. Valentino [Garavani] is also incredible; he entertains beautifully, with wonderful food.”
The other great influence on Santo Domingo’s style is the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, whose effect on a certain kind of effortful effortlessness in fashion (the Yohji Yamamoto shirts, the headbands, the Prada coats) remains nearly 25 years after her death alongside her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr, in a plane crash. Bessette Kennedy grew up in the same Connecticut town as Santo Domingo. “We were neighbours, growing up,” Santo Domingo says. “She was a bit older than me, but she was someone I was always aware of. I always knew who she was. I always really admired her. I admired how she always kept herself even as she was in relation to this much more prominent family she had married into.
“I remember when I was in high school we heard stories that she would go to Canal Street and pick up this patchouli fragrance from this street vendor, and so the second I was old enough I was taking the train into the city and finding the same perfume, even before she was famous. I think she always had that sort of It factor.”
Finding your own style, she says, whether it’s for your wardrobe or your dinner plates, comes down to knowing what you like – and not being afraid to occasionally blow this up.
“I think that in fashion, and in entertaining at home, hopefully at some point in one’s life we can achieve a real personal style and really know what suits us, what makes us feel great, and that we can dress ourselves or dress our table comfortably, with ease. And then once we have that and we know ourselves and we know our style, I think it’s at that moment that we can all have fun and experiment and try new things,” she says.
The art of being a gracious host, and guest, is something Santo Domingo takes seriously. A piece of advice given to her that she holds dear when attending a party is as follows: don’t always look for the most dazzling person there; find the person who might be hovering awkwardly at the edges and chat to them instead. Setting the aesthetic and the vibe of the soiree is, she says, a little like putting together a really good outfit – you need good foundations, some originality and some sparkle.
As for her perfect party, probably it’s in the summer, all the generations are invited and the party stretches long into the evening.
“For summer I do most of my entertaining outdoors,” she says. “I’ve been known, if I have a lunch or a dinner planned and it looks like rain, to immediately reschedule because there’s just something so nice about being outdoors. And if I don’t have to be indoors, I would rather not.
“Outdoors is a place to be using bright colours. Use prints and patterns, mix glassware and colour. Be a bit more playful, have a bit more fun. And it just naturally is more casual. Often when you’re eating outside, meals tend to last longer,” she adds.
“My dream lunch would be in my house in Southampton. My husband would be cooking – grilling, hopefully – things from the garden in summer. We have wonderful tomatoes and corn. We have crab boils, often Maryland crab. Anything where my husband’s cooking and we have multi-generations of parents and children and cousins and all ages. It starts in the late afternoon and goes until the evening. A proper barbecue, all day, would be my ideal meal.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, on sale now.
