Naj Austin, owner of food studio Birdies, and Van Newman, a screenwriter, met during a job interview at Cafe Erzulie, a bar and event venue on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. They were friends for a few years until Newman struck up the courage to tell Austin how they felt. “By the end of the first week of dating, we were planning our wedding,” they say. Now, the couple is planning a 60-person ceremony in Portugal for next summer, a decision that heavily influenced their registry. “We’re asking loved ones and friends to go to another country to watch us get married, so we were very intentional with our registry,” says Austin. “Not a lot of fluff. There’s no plates.” Below, see what did make the cut, including a tiny saucepan for warming up milk and a butter holder they’ve requested for every special occasion.
Van Newman: I’m a bit of tech bro. I’m part of this Slack community called the Jacuzzi Club. They share all the newest things, from apps to consumer-product goods to lifestyle stuff. Someone posted these in there. They are called leisure chairs, but it’s a beach chair and table set. They have a unique style but a timeless quality. Both of us grew up on the East Coast, so neither of us knew we were beach people until we moved to L.A. We’ve really found joy spending weekends at the beach doing nothing, reading, and looking at the ocean.
Naj Austin: I’m very, very big on seasonal produce. My lock screen on my phone is photos of the produce I should be eating that month so that it stays top of mind as I cook and shop. Flamingo Estate has these CSA boxes that they do. It’s such an L.A. brand. It’s adjacent to an Erewhon. The CSA boxes incorporate a variety of items, so you get some hand soap, a candle, some locally sourced fresh products. The boxes are super-curated. We used to do a CSA box in Brooklyn, and I would get 40 zucchini. Nobody needs that much. Theirs is a lot smaller and more intentional. I feel like you actually use all the products and there is no waste. I like the crossover between lifestyle and food.
VN: Hosting is a really big part of us sharing a home. We have a blue-themed kitchen, so I saw this house bowl and it reminded me of us.
NA: We also love bowls in a non-ironic way. Our house is full of little vessels, so this felt like: We are married — here is our marriage bowl.
NA: I’ve talked about buying a butter holder for years. This one’s cute but does the job of holding the butter. I just had a piece of toast and I left the butter on the counter melting away.
VN: I’ve had a butter holder on our anniversary/birthday list for the past two years and it never makes the cut.
NA: One of the things we did when we lived in Brooklyn was to go on coffee walks. In L.A., we are close to two coffee shops, but it’s not like the Flatbush walk with the trees and the dogs and kids. We’ve been making a lot of coffee at home, so I found this pot that’s just for milk. I need to warm up a small amount of milk for a single cup of coffee, so I need the smallest pot available. It says it’s a butter warmer, but that’s stupid. It’s really a small saucepan.
VN: We always have candles or incense going. One of the highest compliments is people coming into our house and saying it smells good. We have a diffuser and plug-in going in every room. We’re kind of obsessive about it. Naj can tell if she walks in the house and incense hasn’t been burned in the last few hours. Anything that makes our house smell good we’ll use. We came across this woodsy candle and really liked it, and we saw that they had a subscription. I like that it’s Brooklyn based. That’s where we spent a lot of our lives and met. It feels like a little piece of home away from home.
NA: I want one because I want to have pizza parties. I could use my oven to make pizza, but it’s not going to give it that same feeling of that almost flat-bread, wood-fired style that the Ooni does. It’s really beautiful and simple to use, and as I broaden my cooking journey, it’s nice to have more tools to play with. Unless it has a clear use or is an asset to the beauty of the space, I don’t want it. I like appliances that feel a bit hidden. I’m very anti-appliances taking over your home. So we don’t own an air fryer. I had a friend who had a pizza oven and used it at her house, and I was like, I’d be outside all the time, but at the time I lived in Brooklyn and didn’t have a backyard. Now that we’re in LA and have a backyard, I can finally get the Ooni and actually put it to use both personally and through Birdies.
VN: Our house is covered in books: music books, regular books, art books. We found this coffee-table book, In Detail, by Noah Davis, from Reparations Club. Rep Club is also one of my favorite spots in L.A. It’s a hub for the community. We’ve known Jazzy, the owner, for a while, since Ethel’s Club days. We’ve also been fans of Noah Davis’s work. I remember visiting L.A. at the time of the Underground Museum, which was another beautiful and important space.
NA: We’re going to make sure that we continue to have the newest books by artists who we love. Our home serves as its own archive on Black art and Black storytelling. We have an enormous art-book library. Continuing to grow that collection is important to me. We also always have people at our house, so it’s a pseudo-library too, especially with Van’s writers café series that they do.
NA: L.A. has been a lot of firsts for us in terms of home stuff: having a backyard, having an actual outside door. We’ve only lived in apartment buildings. In our last apartment, we weren’t allowed to have doormats. We really wanted to find something that was durable and beautiful but not hokey or cheesy.
NA: Van found out about this fridge in Jacuzzi Club, and then I separately, through all of my home-goods stuff, saw it again. Van makes a lot of cocktails; they’re very much the mixologist of the household. Back in Brooklyn, we had absolutely no space for it, but when we moved to L.A., we kept coming back to it. I also really like that the top of the fridge is a usable space. I’m a big multiuse person. I hate buying things, barring the Ooni oven that you can only use for one thing.
VN: There was a period in our Brooklyn apartment where I was trying to experiment with making syrups every week. Half of the stuff has to be chilled or refrigerated, and we just did not have the fridge space. Now, with Naj moving into being a home chef, prepping for catering gigs and pop-ups and pickups, our fridge is so tight. It’ll be nice to have a space for drink experimentation.
VN: When Naj and I first started dating, she had a bidet, which I had never seen or used before. I was obsessed with it. I like that you can control the water temperature. Unfortunately, it did not make it in the journey to our next apartment, and I’ve wanted another one ever since. I think we should all have bidets.
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