I Created a Petite Conservatory—and It's the Chicest Spot in My Apartment

This is Instant Obsession, a weekly column that dishes on all the things our editors are obsessed with right now. From tableware and gorgeous furniture to luxe moisturizer and well-appointed hotels, here's what we're currently dreaming about.

I scored a great apartment. Never mind that it doesn’t have an extra bedroom and the kitchen is a wee affair—just enough counter space to chop something (garlic, always) and stream Succession on my laptop. It’s a New York apartment in Birmingham, Alabama. But separating the living room and kitchen is a 10-foot corridor lined in big, east-facing windows. I can see the sun rise over the foothills and Steinways being delivered to the piano shop below and at night, the tables filling at the cafe next door and the moon rising. In a small apartment, where everything has a purpose, this glassy thruway is utterly open to interpretation.

Enter the petite conservatory: instilling none of the sober, efficient ideals of a small apartment, but rather the ease and atmosphere and sunlight and growth that arrived with the grand garden rooms of history. In Empirical Russian palaces, for instance, cooped-up tsars ordered these glass garden rooms built to allow commune with nature during harsh winters. My bet is, deposit those same gilded rulers in Birmingham in July or August, they’d have built them even quicker.

What once was a pass-through now feels intrinsic to my own DNA, one-part laboratory, one-part observation hall. A place for growing herbs and olive trees and other plants—for growing and thriving and failing and trying again—and it's a place for doing nothing but pouring a cocktail and watching the windows frame the moon. It's a gallery place to arrange curiosities amid my favorite material, stone (I swear I lived in a stone house in a past life, impervious to storm and wind, and permanent to its core) bathed in beautiful back-of-house light.

In a phone call earlier this week, the architect Bobby McAlpine articulated something that I never could. Our homes, he told me, are a manifestation of emotion. They are where “we turn something internal into something external,” he said. That glass hall is connection without a single power outlet (no joke—zero, a power desert). A portal to nature, to the village below, where neighbors and shop owners have become friends. It’s a warm place in the sun when the world is too hot. And it’s an experiment in stone and sunlight and leafy things, without a single keyboard in sight.

Here are the items I'm currently coveting for my apartment conservatory—plus some I already have that make this space feel like a secret garden.