Brittany standing in front of What Are You Waiting For?, a mural she art directed as part of a marketing campaign for Dove chocolate. The bold theme is in keeping with her perspective on life, and even the way she dresses. “When I returned home from my mission to Brazil, I had tons of confidence,” she explains. “I decided that life was too short to dress boring, and I’ve been going with that motto ever since.”
Brittany Watson Jepsen started her blog, The House That Lars Built, in 2008. She was a graduate student in Washington, DC, studying interior design at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. For an assignment in one of her first classes, she was tasked with designing the interior of a family home. Whereas all the other students went the conventional route—creating physical client books—Brittany developed a blog to present her ideas as well as her progress to her fictitious clients: a family seeking a home that reflected their artful life, born in her imagination. Lars, the father, was a fashion designer; Imogen, the mother, was a fine-art painter; and children April Showers and Abraham pursued their interests in crafts and music. The previous summer, Brittany had discovered the burgeoning world of design blogs while interning for designers Jonathan Adler and Celerie Kemble and was intrigued by the platform, then in its infancy. Her first postings on The House That Lars Built included floor plans, furniture specs, digital renderings, design inspiration, and mood boards for each room.
Today The House That Lars Built blog has grown into a full-fledged online business, with Brittany as the creative director and master influencer at the helm. It is positioned around the same “artful life” theme she used for her fictitious family’s home, but with an added emphasis on DIY projects. The DIY part is thanks to Brittany’s natural affinity for making things—and her love for making them beautiful—as well as a series of seemingly random events.
Brittany began this scissor collection when a friend gifted her an especially beautiful antique pair (the ones with the white handles and engraved blades in this photo). “Scissors are a symbol of making,” Brittany says. “They don’t have to be beautiful to work well, but these are.” Wherever she goes in the world, she is always on the lookout for a special pair, as are friends who know about her collection.
During the summer of 2009, between her first and second years at the Corcoran School, Brittany enrolled in a six-week textile design course at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen. Before setting off, she wrote to over two dozen blogs to offer her services as an intern-correspondent in Scandinavia. The only one to respond was Design*Sponge, a trailblazer of that era. In classes in Copenhagen, Brittany learned about color and repeat patterns as well as screen- and digital printing, and she visited the studios of prominent designers and factories where textiles were produced, including the famed Marimekko headquarters in Helsinki, Finland. During downtime, she traveled throughout Scandinavia to interview interior, product, and stationery designers and photograph their homes and studios for Design*Sponge. In the midst of all that activity, she met Paul Jepsen, whom she would marry a year later. While Brittany’s work for Design*Sponge helped her draw readers to her own site, which was still very small, the attention her wedding photos generated turned out to be the game changer that drew in the most followers and put her on the design blog map.
For the fun of it, Brittany had decided to treat her wedding in Southern California, where she grew up, like a full-on art and design project. Her outdoor garden reception was, for her, a chance to create a fantastical wonderland that reflected her love of crafting, flowers, and fashion, as well as the story of her courtship with Paul in Denmark and her own Danish heritage. There were carefully curated mood boards and palettes, letter-pressed invitations addressed with calligraphy, hand-painted banners and table aprons, and bow ties sewn out of Liberty of London florals. But, probably more than anything, it was the paper flowers that set the mood. For the centerpieces, walkways, and stairs, Brittany and her mom and sister transformed art paper into gigantic (eighteen-inch-wide) poppies inspired by the landscape in the story Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen, arguably Denmark’s most famous writer. Her bouquet was a humongous paper poppy, watercolored in blush tones on a three-foot stem. The overall effect evoked a cross between an enchanted fairy-tale garden and the set of a high-fashion photo shoot.
Scissors are so key to Brittany’s work that she included a pair in her logo. Check out the clever “A” in “Lars.”
Brittany posted photos from the wedding on her private Facebook page after the reception, and right away, a colleague from her internship at Jonathan Adler linked her to a friend at the 100 Layer Cake blog who asked her to produce a paper-flower tutorial. Next came requests from other wedding and craft blogs for DIY projects, then from new fans around the world who wanted to buy finished flowers. The couple had returned to Copenhagen to live, but Brittany didn’t have her Danish working papers yet, so she was relieved to find this small stream of income. She opened an Etsy shop, began posting on Pinterest and Instagram, and amped up her own blog, where readership was continuing to grow thanks to the traffic her contributions to other sites was generating. Among the customers who found her via social media platforms were fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who was considering using the mega-size flowers for displays, and the retailer Terrain, which ordered five hundred miniature poppy, ranunculus, and rose gift toppers to sell in their shops.
By 2011, Brittany had been granted her working papers but had not yet found a formal job, so she kept on chugging along as one idea led to another, including a decision to travel to London for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and to design and sell royal wedding memorabilia. While the memorabilia—a plate, mug, tote bag, and print—was meant to be the focus and sold well from her station on Portobello Road, at some English boutiques, and from her Etsy shop, it was Brittany’s hat, festooned with one of her huge pink paper roses, that garnered the most attention, landing a photo of her on Vogue UK’s website and on CNN’s homepage.
While I was visiting, the Lars team worked together to make paper-flower crowns for some of the young girls who would be in the upcoming wedding party of blog coordinator Becca Hansen (seated at left).
“I feel you appreciate your belongings more if you have some hand in making them.”
This full-on, no-holds-barred approach to the royal nuptials—not to mention her graduate school assignment and her wedding design—reflects her bold, goal-oriented attitude toward life in general. “I have always thought of myself as coming from this great heritage, from people who did really cool things, and that has fueled me and made me want to do cool things myself,” Brittany explained to me as we sat together in her office in the House That Lars Built headquarters, which were, at the time, in Springville, Utah, at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. For starters, her mother and aunt both danced for George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet in the 1960s; another aunt was a successful television actress; her paternal great-grandfather was the president of the American Dental Association. Many of Brittany’s ancestors were Mormons who made the arduous crossing of the plains from the Midwest to Utah by foot and in covered wagons in the mid-1800s, including Patty Sessions, her fifth great-grandmother, a midwife whose prized journals provide historians with a firsthand account of daily life at the time and a record of thousands of births.
During her childhood, Brittany, her three younger siblings, and her parents lived in Dana Point in Orange County, California, and she vividly recalls visits to her grandmother Dorothy’s house about an hour and a half north in Bel Air (back then a small, cozy Los Angeles neighborhood). “Her sewing room was legendary to me,” Brittany says. From there, Dorothy made all her own clothing and taught Brittany and her sister to sew. “She had a cabinet full of fabric. We would sew clothing for a Shirley Temple doll and for ourselves,” Brittany remembers. “And I would sew things at home and gift them to her for Christmas. She always expressed how grateful she was, which taught me the value of a handmade gift.” Back in Dana Point, Brittany’s mother was no slouch in the crafting department either. A trained interior designer, she posted a sign on the family refrigerator that read A Creative Mess Is Better Than Tidy Idleness.
Inspired by a Chanel couture runway show featuring massive, mechanized blooming paper flowers in Paris’s Grand Palais, Brittany created this charming tablescape adaptation for the blog.
“Our house was messy because we were always making things,” Brittany remembers. Painting, coloring, sewing. “My mother was super-experimental.” One of Brittany’s most vivid memories of her creative aspirations as a child was trying to emulate the folk-art style of her hero Mary Engelbreit, an illustrator who licensed her images for use on all sorts of products, from greeting cards to housewares, and also ran her own magazine, Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion. In response, Brittany’s mother encouraged her creative daughter to paint her Engelbreit-inspired motifs directly onto old family furniture.
Brittany fantasized about studying for an undergraduate degree in interior design at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, but she didn’t have the portfolio required for admission to that program—having spent her high school years focused on academics, tennis, and the cello—or the confidence to figure out how to put one together. Instead, she studied art history, thinking she’d become a historian or work at a museum, but an internship during her last semester with the research department at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, convinced her otherwise. In the windowless office where she was stationed, she realized that she felt more in sync with the artists visiting to study the collections than to the administrators and academics. After graduation, she managed to land a job in the interior design department of a major hotel chain, but she realized quickly that she needed more skills.
Brittany and her team created this tablescape inspired by traditional blue-and-white porcelain, complete with five vases made out of painted recycled cardboard.
Fortunately, her undergraduate experience had imbued her with the courage she needed to finally put together a portfolio, as had an eighteen-month mission to Brazil in between her sophomore and junior years. This voluntary church program involved learning to speak Portuguese, living in remote villages, participating in service projects, setting goals, and sharing her Mormon faith. “It was,” she recalls, “the hardest and one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.” The experience was such a confidence booster that by the time she entered the Corcoran School graduate program in the fall of 2007, she was on her own mission: to eke every last drop of value from this opportunity, which she was taking out loans to pay for. Brittany figured out right away that her primary interest was adornment: anything to which she could apply pattern or color. And that led her to Denmark to study textile design and, eventually, to marrying and living there with Paul until the end of 2012, at which point the couple decided to move to Provo, where Paul enrolled in an English literature degree program at BYU.
Back in the States, Brittany was the main breadwinner—this time Paul was the one without working papers—so she immediately began job hunting. Simultaneously, companies who wanted to sponsor her blog content began approaching her, and she gradually realized that she had a viable business on her hands. Among her clients that first year (2013) were Microsoft, Caesarstone, and EuroLighting. Since then she has collaborated with many more companies, big and small, including True Value, Godiva, Coca-Cola, and Netflix. Over time she has hired help, taken on a business partner with a master’s in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and moved the office out of her living room and into first the raw 3,000-square-foot space in an old industrial building on a dairy farm where I met her, and later into a four-bedroom nineteenth-century house about ten minutes away in Spanish Fork.
For a DIY Halloween post, Brittany designed (and modeled) a Ruth Bader Ginsburg costume, complete with Justice Ginsburg’s signature glasses and collar, plus a judge’s gavel, all made out of paper. While living in Washington, DC, Brittany attended a lecture by RBG, an experience she says she’ll never forget.
These days, Brittany and her team post on their site every weekday, mixing homegrown unsponsored content with, several times a month, paid campaigns. Although craft tutorials remain the big draw for Lars readership, the content covers many facets of interior design as well as travel, home-keeping, party planning, fashion, and art. Brittany sees clients whose products aren’t obviously aligned with craft as among the most interesting. “There’s always this thought that this could be super-tacky, and to some people it could look like selling out, but I like to think about what I can do with it to make it awesome and beautiful and still read House That Lars Built.” Often, these turn out to be Brittany’s favorite projects. For example, for Capital One, the Lars team created a floral paper swag for a wedding getaway car, and for the EcoScraps soil company, they created a Polish planter-chandelier called a pajaki.
While the blog landscape has changed and the format is no longer as popular as it once was, the House That Lars Built readership has remained steady in the hundreds of thousands, and Brittany and her business partner are exploring ways of growing their enterprise, including product design, retail, video, and collaborations with other artists.
Brittany designed this planter-chandelier, inspired by Polish pajaki, for a partnership with a garden supply company. She doesn’t spend as much time making projects these days—more often than not, she is art directing the blog coordinator and a team of interns—but she looks forward to a time when she’ll be able to be more hands-on again. “Paul and I often talk about what my dream life looks like,” she explains. “I’d like to retire to the South of France and just make things. I want to embroider and draw for fun.”
Brittany’s long-term intention is to become a full lifestyle brand. Interestingly, while she understands the importance of social media in her business model, she doesn’t look to it for creative inspiration nearly as often as she used to. On Instagram, for example, she bemoans creative homogenization. “It’s awesome that we can be in the same kind of tribe all across the world,” she says. “But we need people to continue telling their own stories.” She worries about skills being lost, about artists being lured by ideas that make them more popular on social media but result in a sameness in their work.
To keep her own ideas fresh, Brittany goes back to somewhat “old-school” ways: She travels, references her library of art books, and draws upon the knowledge, tools, and perspective she gained during her undergraduate and graduate school education. Then she adds her own unique flair, the seeds of which were surely planted by her ancestors “who did really cool things.”
Paper fireworks as cake toppers for a Fourth of July celebration.
An oversized paper-chain mural.
“Live Artfully” is the House that Lars Built motto. Here, the sign sits next to a wedding-day photo of Brittany and her mom, who Brittany says is the most creative person she has ever met.
Brittany dreams of running a full lifestyle brand with a handmade theme running through it. “I feel you appreciate your belongings more if you have some hand in making them,” she says.
These grade school reports attest to Brittany’s long-standing attraction to art and flowers.
During my visit, Brittany was tracking the progress of two projects on a wall in her office: (top) photography for her first book, Craft the Rainbow, and (bottom) early ideas for expanding the retail side of the Lars website.