AphroChic: Celebrating the Legacy of the Black Family Home

By Kate Mazade

"Home is like 'soul'—indescribable, but you know it when you feel it and you miss it when it’s gone."

Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason's new book AphroChic is all at once a collective history, a design inspiration, and an ode to families. The coffee table anthology, complete with vibrant photography and intimate profiles, serves a far greater purpose than casual page-turning and remote control-holding—it opens a window into the familial dedication and cultural reflection of "home."

Published by Penguin Random House in November 2022, AphroChic: Celebrating the Legacy of the Black Family Home takes stock of the Black journey to homeownership and the generational touches that turn a space into a sanctuary. This book is just the latest in the authors' exploration of design and culture.

Paul Suepat and Tommy Wong’s prewar brownstone in Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Patrick Cline for *AphroChic*.

The husband-and-wife team of Bryan Mason and Jeanine Hays started AphroChic in 2007, but the blog quickly grew into a design and media company using interiors, products, fashion, and content to "celebrate creativity from across the African Diaspora." The pair previously authored REMIX: Decorating with Culture, Objects and Soul, which was published by Penguin Random house in 2013.

"African American design is uniquely experiential in that it isn’t defined by look as much as it is by feel."

AphroChic contains 16 profiles of Black homes divided into heirloom, creative, boss, and off the beaten path categories. In each chapter, the residents describe their path to homeownership and particular design style or philosophy, often referencing their childhood residences and the influences that shape the feeling of their homes.

The profiles range from chef Alexander Smalls's textile-filled Harlem escape to movement artist Nana Yaa Asare Boadu's crisp Brooklyn pied-à-terre, from actor/entrepreneur Bridgid Coulter's airy Hawaiian destination to Camille and Joe Simmons's fairytale cottage in California's San Bernardino Mountains. While the residents may go into detail about a particular piece of furniture or artwork, the profiles capture their sense of home, drawing out colors and patterns that evoke nostalgia and familiarity.

"Memory is the root of soul, and a vital part of African American design."

Many chapters include a sidebar entitled "Memories of Home," in which the interview subjects illuminate their families' stories in their own words. The short red-framed stories give voice to the genealogy that informs the individual's current day character and desires.

"While the home portraits show us the triumph of individuals, the larger history reveals the travails of a people."

Five history sections entitled "The Journey Home" are interspersed throughout the book, weaving Black history from Emancipation and Reconstruction to the Great Recession and COVID-19 into the narrative, a common thread that stitches together a multicolored quilt of experience.

The text, while approachable and beautifully written, is only half of the book's power. The cover and chapters are ushered in with a bold scarlet frame, reclaiming the color from history urban redlining as a welcome rather than an exclusion.

Treci and Amir Smith’s home in Bonita, California. Photo by Patrick Cline for *AphroChic*.

The photographs—warm and inviting, as if the homeowner had invited the reader through the threshold with a hot beverage and a friendly "make yourself at home"— were shot by the late Patrick Cline. The co-founder of the online interior design magazine Lonny had been collaborating with Hays and Mason for nearly a decade, but passed away in early 2022, before the book's release.

In the acknowledgements, the authors dedicate the book to Cline, lauding the images as breathtaking and showing "Black life in a way that we haven’t seen before in an interiors book—authentic, relaxed, regal, effortless, real."

Saturated and dynamic, AphroChic is a home design book that goes beyond fabrics and wall hangings to explore a people's grand designs on "home."

AphroChic is available in hardcover and ebook formats.