We Asked Women In Creative Fields About The “Holy Grail” Home Items They Can’t Live Without

With all respect to the ancient ideal of "having it all," we now live in the era of "having nothing save for a very small number of functional, well-placed items."

Even if you've yet to discard any and all items that don't bring you obvious joy in your home, there's still a valuable lesson to be learned from the less-is-more approach to decor curation: Individual objects, when chosen with care, can entirely transform our spaces.

These are our "holy grail" home items — the beloved fixtures that our spaces take shape around. Sometimes, they're gloriously practical: an unrivaled bench scraper or a well-placed broom gripper. Sometimes, they're the ornaments that shift aesthetics, that offer personality to otherwise uninspiring spaces: the set of handblown glasses brought back from vacation or the incense purchased to make the olfactory experience of living in New York that much more bearable.

To honor those very items, we reached out to women we admire across creative industries — food, fashion, design, media — to find out what the “holy grail” items in their homes look like. Read on for their picks, then go home and revel in all the exceptional, minute details in your own home.