Serve your guests elegance and surprise
Here, Josh and Diana Perrin share Thanksgiving strategies and a seasonal tablescape — seen above — created in collaboration with florist Megan Gray of Honey and Poppies.
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Start with the fundamentals. We usually will pick a place setting and base everything else around that,” Diana said. For this layout, “we were thinking fall colors, mixed metals and woods and warmth” to go with Casa de Perrin’s porcelain plates with a faux concrete finish, placed over handmade Italian glass chargers next to gold-rimmed, smoke-colored glassware. There’s a lot of tweaking that goes into each tablescape, Diana said, but in the end, “we’re visual people and we can tell what works. We eyeball it a lot.”
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Experiment with dried flowers. “If you’re going to use dried flowers, this is definitely the season to do it,” Diana said. Dried components can be gathered ahead of time and are sturdy, unlike fresh arrangements. In the photo at the top of the page, Gray mixes fresh sage, mini pumpkins and small fall fruit, available at most grocery stores, for variety and texture. She also incorporated natural beeswax candles to complement the mustard-color ribbon tied around earth-tone sprigs, and she found large dried leaves on Etsy. Diana and Gray linked the dried rosebuds with twine for a subtle flourish.
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Add surprise touches. Diana says she likes to “include a little unexpected element that’s not floral and not table settings.” She bought the brass birds on Etsy, along with the blush linen napkins and ribbon. The soft napkins are a chromatic element “that you wouldn’t necessarily expect” with these autumnal colors, she said. The candleholders are actually inexpensive flower holders Gray bought and spray-painted.
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Don’t go overboard. A classic Casa de Perrin setup for an Instagram post and a blowout event includes multiple glasses and accouterments such as salt cellars and dedicated small spoons. The Perrins, however, don’t expect people to do this at home. For their own dinners, they’ll mix casual stemless glasses with stemware for wine, for instance, and they don’t worry about matching wine varietals to specialty glasses.
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Ask guests to pitch in. The couple treats their dishes with extreme care. But that doesn’t mean they don’t ask friends to help out after a big, celebratory, group dinner. “All that work and that whole meal for 10 minutes of work” is a reasonable deal, Josh said. Recruit kitchen helpers, including kids. Even two guests on washing and drying duties can make a huge difference to the hosts. “And then they leave feeling good about themselves,” Josh said.