Habitat No. 1: Finding Joy in the Process with Emily Gilbert

Welcome to our newest journal series: Habitat.

Our habitats refer to our natural homes and environments, something we’re a bit obsessed with around here. Clove has a large focus on hospitality and fostering this within our clients’ homes. We believe homes should be deeply treasured, richly lived in and freely shared. But within those guardrails, living well and exercising hospitality looks different for everyone. Through this series, we’ll meet people from varying locations and backgrounds, inviting us into their home and sharing what home and hospitality means to them. We cannot wait.

This first home tour and interview was an easy choice! Emily is a dear friend of mine (Abby here.) We first met in college - our boyfriends were roommates and we then became roommates ourselves while studying abroad in Italy. It didn’t take long until we shoved our twin beds together and spent many nights watching movies and many mornings drinking espresso and chatting for hours. Now, ten years later, we remain close friends and always look forward to at least one weekend together each year.

I have firsthand experienced the rich hospitality of the Gilbert’s friendship and homemaking skills, and I cannot wait for you to read our conversation below while soaking in images of their warm and cozy minimalist home.

Emily shares about apartment living, her design philosophy, and all about her ever-expanding cooking and gardening passions. From growing vegetables from seed, milling her own flour for bread, fermentation discoveries, and local food sourcing, Emily shares all about patience and process - and how ultimately this pours over into friendship, hospitality, and enjoying the simple things in life.

Just reading her answers below reminded me to slow down and savor the people and moments right in front of me. (And that I must can tomatoes this year!)

I hope you can grab a weekend coffee, find a cozy spot, and enjoy Emily’s words and photos below.

Please introduce yourself!

Hi!! I’m Emily Gilbert, I live with my husband, Zach in Des Moines, Iowa. We both grew up in the countryside of Iowa and have lived in Des Moines for nine years. We currently both work at the same (awesome) small company and we share a lot of hobbies, so our lives are completely synced up right now!

Tell us a little about your home.

We live on the top floor of a 99-year-old duplex located in an old neighborhood in Des Moines. We struck gold with our current landlord – he is a good man, a respectful communicator, and takes meticulous care of the building and grounds. For example, the unit sat empty for a year before we moved in so that the oil could cure properly on the resealed wood floors! The closets have original wallpaper, there is thick wood trim detailing every room, the bathroom is teeny tiny, and best of all – the kitchen has the original shaker style cabinets and drawers.

What’s something you love about apartment living?

 There are so many things that I love about apartment living! Having rented for ten years has helped us narrow down what we really want and need in a home. We are quite minimal people who value having time and relationships over possessions and status. So, for that reason, we love not having to maintain a yard right now or replace water heaters and instead spend that time and money on outdoor recreation and vacations! We also have many good friends living within a one mile radius from us. We always have friends popping by and we know how rare that is.

However, we are both design minded and creative, so we do care about what our rental space looks like and we’re thoughtful about what gets brought in and kept in our space – every piece has to be both useful and beautiful. Being limited on space has also taught me how to be resourceful. For example, since there isn’t space in the basement to store seasonal decorations, I’ve made it a challenge to only use holiday décor that can be composted when finished. We also have a mini-fridge in our kitchen and have been gradually drinking less alcohol, so I am researching how to cure salamis in a mini fridge!

Speaking of curing salami in a mini fridge…tell us about your cooking and gardening hobbies!

The older I get, the lower my view of our American food system becomes. Combine that with the desire for nutrient dense and delicious food and you get the rewarding and fascinating quest to figure out how to both source and make all of the very best food available. Our great grandmothers had it right! I am very fortunate to have a community garden in my neighborhood that’s about a 10 minute walk away – I grow mainly tomato and pepper varieties for canning as well as herbs for drying and cucumbers for pickling.

I am always working on sourcing local and in-season fruit that’s grown without pesticides – so I know most all the fruit tree owners in our neighborhood and where the alleyway berry bushes are. I have learned what types of mushrooms, nuts, and wild herbs grow in our area and try to get to the woods as often as I can.

I’ve been grinding my own flour/grain for the last year or so which has been a fun discovery! It takes bread, pasta, pie crusts, banana bread, and crackers to a whole new level of flavor AND keeps the nutritious parts of a wheat berry (which conventional white flour removes for shelf stability). We started sourcing our own local grass fed beef and foraged grazed pork. We like to grill, smoke, grind our own chili meat, and lean on Julia Child’s cookbooks for all of the new cuts of meat that we aren’t familiar with!

Most recently, a friend included me in her raw A2 milk share and it’s delicious!! I’ve learned how to make butter, sour cream, cream cheese, buttermilk, and yogurt but can’t wait to dip my toes in a little further to soft cheeses and maybe someday aged cheese!

How did you first get started with gardening? 

My very first garden was in the backyard of my first Des Moines apartment! There was already a little garden plot for the tenants and I bought some herbs and was so proud of how they grew! When we moved apartments, I was determined to make a garden where there wasn’t and grew a few bushes of kale for smoothies and a few herbs. I had a neighbor at the time who had chickens and bees and used every square inch of his yard for growing produce, so he really sparked an interest of what inner city gardening could look like. When we moved to our current apartment five years ago, I connected with the community garden and have expanded my knowledge each year through trial and error.

How did your kitchen and homemaking skills evolve from there? 

Things maybe got a little obsessive from there! Once I started growing my veggies, it was hard to buy tomatoes out of season at the store. They don’t hold a flame in flavor and I know they were grown in a hydroponic greenhouse somewhere. So I started canning my own produce. But when I was buying things like pectin and white wine vinegar at the store for canning, I started to wonder how to make my own white wine vinegar (start with a mother from Dr. Bragg’s ACV and add 1 part wine and 1 part water and let ferment for a few months) and what exactly is this packaged pectin (pectin is just a naturally occurring chemical found in fruits with hard outer cell walls used to add thickness to jams). So I started making my own of every ingredient and that hasn’t stopped! I am intensely curious about how to make things myself and seeing how much better tasting and less expensive that can be. This has led to a wonderful cycle of fermenting, distilling, baking, cooking, composting, foraging, gardening, and building relationships with my neighborhood and farmers nearby.

A lot of your hobbies involve a process - often, many months. What do you think you’ve learned in the waiting?

I have certainly learned patience and that the the rich and deep things in life are not convenient! My favorite room in our apartment is the kitchen. I love getting to spend hours working on the next step in many different projects happening simultaneously. In an evening, I can be stretching & folding sourdough, starting an overnight ferment of sour cream, eyeing the sauerkraut, shaking up the homemade vanilla in the cupboard, and reading a new cook book on how to use fresh milled flour for homemade pasta (currently learning). To me this is the right way to live! What better way than to gift yourself and others food that has been carefully and meticulously built over time.

What does hospitality mean to you? Do you find your hobbies overlapping with hospitality?

Hospitality is sharing. And that’s one of the best feelings in the world! I’m always curious about new experiences - Zach and I both are like that. Sharing hobbies together is one of the things that makes our marriage really special and intentional. But, even better is when you invite friends and family who are curious too and end up getting to share great memories together. That’s what bonds us as humans. So, I invite all of my friends who are curious about gardening to get a plot at our community garden! And I share recipes with people who appreciate my concoctions and hear what they are learning about. It’s the best way to live – simply and with a lot of people.

Going beyond your kitchen, how would you describe your style + where do you find inspiration?

My interior style is very classic and utilitarian. I love the history of a structure but need it to feel balanced between antique and modern. I only want natural materials that make a space feel warm in the cold months and airy in the warm ones. I want to have a beautiful hardworking country home mindset but within the convenience of our small city. I personally don’t like “décor” for the sake of decoration. I like to look at the things in my home and admire their beauty and craftsmanship and know that they serve a purpose!

I find the most inspiration when I travel. We recently went to Sevilla, Spain and the architecture is incredibly beautiful and purposeful. Something that stuck with me is these thick palm leaf woven exterior curtains that many of the top story apartments have that help shield the harsh sunlight in the summer and it’s enchanting! And for the daily inspo – there’s always the deep hole of Instagram, Pinterest, Remodelista, and films – some of the best interiors come from movie sets.

Do you have any home rituals that are important to you?

Oh yes! We live in Iowa where all four seasons are extreme. To combat the winter blues, I try and walk or run outside everyday no matter the conditions. The very best hygge style reward is coming home and drawing a warm bath and soaking with the window slightly open. I’m working on perfecting my beeswax candles and recently got a vintage taper candle mold. I would really like to keep lamps off during the winter evenings and spend the dark hours using candles for light – it’s so much better for your brain to see fire than artificial light as it is preparing you for sleep. During the rest of the year, I like to sit on my porch and read in the evenings. It’s a relaxing way to wind down and I find that it combats the workday spent inside an office.

Where can we find you and follow along with your home and hobbies?

I’m on Instagram @emjoygilbert and many of my good photos and creative ideas come from my husband @zacharygilbert. I also have a little side hobby project that is starting up again called Fence Homewares. Beautiful and useful home goods sold exclusively on Instagram @fencehomewares. And if you really want to dig deep, I used to write a little blog for fun at pleasantstblog.com.