All-In-One Suppliers
And Wilsons Leather Maxima
HOUSE REPORT
A tenet I’ve developed in ten-ish years of compulsive home organizing is to borrow ideas wherever possible. Take your kitchen workflow from a chef, your tool storage from a woodworker. For large collections of miscellaneous things, I look to local retailers. Not boutiques or shops with custom built-ins, which are $$$ — visit hardware stores, dollar stores, pharmacies. Anything these shops use to display their wares is likely affordable, accessible (i.e. easy to buy nearby), and flexible to changing use. Organization is about adaptation as much as structure; my systems fail when they’re rigid and work best it’s quick and painless to make changes, so that versatility is essential.
In New York, a lot of stores use pegboard, which is cheap and brain-soothingly easy to reconfigure. Lowe’s charges $25 for a 4-foot-by-8-foot panel, which you may need to get cut in half at the store to fit into a car. (Home Depot also sells it, but theirs has a textured surface and is generally worse.) You’ll also need furring strips to float the pegboard away from the wall (here’s a tutorial), a hand saw to cut materials to size (here’s my favorite), some sharp-point lathe screws, and a starter set of hooks.
Our kitchen is low on cabinet space, so we hung pots, pans, and utensils on an 8-foot-by-8-foot wall of pegboard. Over time, other things we use in the kitchen found their place: pens, labeling tape, cutting boards, spice rack, radio. The entire project cost about $70 and took a half-day to install. It’s a great beginner DIY project — most of the ways you’ll mess up are invisible in the end — and once it’s up, you learn that there’s a pegboard accessory for everything. Pegboard also comes in steel and plastic; I am normally not a huge fan of plastic as a building material, but these translucent panels are kinda sick.
Slightly less popular is gridwall, a metal wire panel mounted on brackets — it’s often used to display merch at conventions, and it also houses orchids at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for reasons I can’t intuit. It’s simpler to mount than pegboard, but the trade-off is less adaptability: the hooks lock into place and take some effort to move around. If you bang into it, it’s noisy as hell, so also not ideal for a high-touch area.
We use it in a front hallway for coats, bags, hats, anything you grab on your way out of the house. Although I prefer pegboard in general, gridwall’s sturdiness means you never worry about loading it down, and it’s much higher-capacity than individual hooks or a peg rail. You can stagger coats and hats, reconfigure it seasonally, or clear it out before a party. I get my gridwall and hardware from All-In-One Suppliers, a family business that has served the New York retail sector since 1914. (They’re one of the only places in NYC where you can find tags in multicolored card stock.) They’ll even customize hardware: we ordered mounting brackets shortened by an inch so we could save every bit of space in the hallway (this came out to $5 per bracket). Plus, if you visit IRL, you can see the creepy mannequins.
SEARCH TERM REPORT
From top left: blue rabbit fur jacket ($135), suede jean-print skirt ($75), silver-green jeans ($48), sexy pants ($180), studded leather jacket ($129), tie-dye jacket ($400), brown jacket ($250), suede hoodie ($50), pink rabbit poncho ($39)
It is possible that launching too many diffusion brands led to the downfall of Wilsons, an American leather goods company founded in 1899 and acquired in 2008 amid a several-year downturn by G-III Apparel Group. But those diffusion brands rule. Search Wilsons Maxima for Y2K clubwear — suede hoodies, many matching sets and opportunities to reunite lost siblings, like these purple jeans and matching jacket and any number of O-ring bustiers, skirts, and sexy pants in white, black (size 12 and 4), and burgundy. For menswear, search for Wilsons M. Julian; I love this tie-dye suede and this motorcycle jacket. For a nice, normal black leather jacket for less than $50, look up Wilsons Pelle.
Some more leather sources:
Margaret Godfrey for beautifully finished women’s leather. Here’s a burgundy metallic jacket and matching pants.
eBay store Vintage Leather Closet has well-curated, well-cared-for stock in a wide range of sizes. And my god, the styling. Leather gloves with every look, leather tie tucked into the waistband. The riding crop??? Genius.
RECOMMENDATIONS BOARD
“Find what you’ve been missing”
RECS GIVEN
Re: moving a rug under a bed, Siska writes: “Use sliders or cardboard under the legs so the bed glides instead of sulks. If not, the rug will always lose.”
SEEKING RECS
Socks
“Trouser suggestions for people with small waist to large thigh ratios. Or stores to check out? Looking for black & sleek dress wear,” $50-100 range
Have an answer? Seeking a recommendation? Fill out this form, comment on Substack, or email me at eprinzschwartz@gmail.com. Responses will run the following week.
that kitchen pegboard setup is a dream
Because a well-loved rug is meant for forever <3