There’s a principle of eating places (popularized by restaurant business skilled Ben Leventhal) that each restaurant desires, in its restaurant coronary heart, to be both a nightclub or a diner. My pal Alison Thurston—who loves dinner events and thrifting for dwelling decor and analyzing the folks we all know as a lot as I do—and I’ve developed our personal principle of properties: Each dwelling, in its dwelling coronary heart, both desires to be a sanctuary or a restaurant. (Binaries are as false as they’re helpful frameworks, and generally they’re very enjoyable.) Sanctuary properties are sunlit, minimalist, filled with crops, quiet, peaceable—and a positive signal that they’ve been actualized is a way of ethereal placelessness. Restaurant properties are curated, candlelit, soundtracked, oriented towards socializing—and a positive signal that they’ve been actualized is, I’ve determined, customized matchbooks.
And the persons are customizing! I’ve seen them twice in individual, and on-line aplenty: ones with martini glass icons and arms clanking glasses, illustrated pets and different graphic logos, even a line drawing of a house’s facade, with sort stating issues like “Polly’s Place” or “Cripe Cottage.”
Alison and I each have restaurant properties. However solely Alison has customized matchbooks. They’re a superb mauve with no identify and simply her deal with and an insignia of a cat on the again. She has an ‘solely first-time visitors’ coverage for handing them out. For this reason we have now restaurant properties, we like to ask the brand new. “I like all the time having random folks come over,” she says. “My favourite factor about single and barely manic associates is they create a random visitor to dinner. If you’re in a sanctuary it is advisable to be vetted, and be a visitor who behaves.” We love visitors who don’t behave. She now distributes the extras to our pal’s “dilettante lovers who we’ll by no means see once more” and to the Philadelphia Gasoline Works technician who inspects the pipes.
Earlier than Alison, I first even realized concerning the chance {that a} human civilian might order their very own customized matchbooks for one thing aside from a marriage from a TikTok by artwork director Delaney Lundquist, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and posts inside design content material on social media beneath the deal with @tremont_home. She thinks the enchantment, for her initially and for the greater than 18,000 individuals who preferred her TikTok about her customized “Tremont Dwelling” matchbooks (which she sells templates for on Etsy), is celebratory freewill.
Inside design content material creator Delaney Lundquist sells templates for her customized “Tremont Dwelling” matchbooks on Etsy.
“If you’re in your twenties and thirties, the novelty of getting your individual house, that you’re fully accountable for, may be very particular,” she says. “Commemorating that with a memento that’s extremely personalised, and possibly a little bit little bit of an inside joke, is playful. I believe that’s what actually sticks with folks.”
“And,”—she provides instantly—”the inside house is more and more seen and performative on social media. The matchbook is a little bit visible identifier, a illustration of your model and your house and your persona.”
Nick O’Brien, the CEO and founding father of Templi, a printed items firm that has seen a 336 p.c improve in customized matchbook orders since 2022, says in fact the rise in folks making customized matchbooks for his or her homes might be tied to the affect of social media tradition. Is it a crystallization of the commodification of home-life-as-personal-brand? (Assume: an ambient impulse to have a cocktail party that appears tasteful, regardless of the way it tastes, and that tasks a way of your “aesthetic.”) Positive it’s. However, O’Brien says, it’s all acquired an enormous wink to it. Pet portraits on the matchbook covers are as frequent as satirical references to English estate-culture or sly indications that one’s home is a nook bar. O’Brien factors to a memorable forest inexperienced set he printed with the phrases “Meet Me at Gianna’s” and a tablescape illustration. “It reveals a love of restaurant tradition,” he says, “It’s informal, they usually’re simply making an attempt to have enjoyable.”
O’Brien provides that a part of the enchantment for private matchbooks is that they’re newly obtainable for the common shopper. Up to now couple years, he explains, the minimal order for customized matchbooks has come means, means down as a result of printing improvements from the producers. Beforehand, minimums could be one thing like 5,000 gadgets per order, and now they will fairly begin at 50 items, for about $100. On-line graphic design platforms like Canva, in addition to the supply of for-sale templates on Etsy, has made the design facet extra accessible as effectively.
Like many private objects that {photograph} effectively, these matchbooks, of their tiny means, carry the weighty pressure between residing on-line and offline. In a November 2025 New York Instances story, Jennifer Bradley Franklin wrote concerning the rise in common folks giving on a regular basis properties household crests, names, and insignia, and the broader pattern of presenting home areas as a part of a fastidiously crafted id and picture. The branding of the home is effortful.
O’Brien imagines that persons are drawn to those bodily markers as a rejection of the screen-heavy world. The matchbook is one thing actual to carry. But it surely’s additionally a sign that you simply’re residing an offline life wherein persons are coming to your own home and hanging out with you. And it’s a sign that appears excellent in images, to point to folks on-line about your life offline. “Does it {photograph}?” he asks rhetorically. “Extraordinarily effectively. It’s troublesome to mess it up. It’s engagement-inducing.”
Life-style content material creator Rachel Shea DiBease’s customized matchbooks say: “I stole this from Rachel’s.”
There’s a pure delight to those objects that’s undercut by the tradition of the second: that all the things looks like it might be in service of a curated ethos. Sheila Liming, creator of the 2023 ebook Hanging Out: The Radical Energy of Killing Time, says that this little pressure vibrating in every customized matchbook is what makes the phenomenon so fascinating. “It makes it really feel just like the stranger is the principle viewers for that gesture, and never essentially the one that’s benefiting from it within the second,” she says, “which is a unusually depersonalizing solution to go about internet hosting somebody in your house.” (In fact, when you’re a restaurant, you actually do court docket the stranger.)
On the similar time, Liming provides, mementos are fantastic: “There’s a matchbook in my purse proper now that I’ve been carrying round for over a 12 months, as a result of it jogs my memory of a sure assembly that I had in a restaurant with an individual, proper? I can perceive how this souvenir tradition, or this attachment to mementos, has carried over into internet hosting tradition, and that need to possibly stamp an expertise with a bodily object in the identical type of means.”
Like most mementos, the matchbook is actual and it exists to reference an intangible expertise. I forgot partway by scripting this that matchbooks are literally helpful. And I take advantage of them! All time! I gentle candles with them virtually every single day. They spark my thrice-yearly cigarettes.
Customized matchbooks, by design, gained’t be seen all over the place. They’re not the standing espresso desk ebook. Their standing is of their individuality and your pursuit of this personalised indulgence. Content material creator Rachel Shea DiBease, who posts life-style content material from her properties in Charleston and Philadelphia, thinks they’re nice eye-catchers. Her customized matchbooks say: “I stole this from Rachel’s.”
“It’s a dialog starter,” she says. “Once I first began doing it, my husband, who’s at school for structure, his associates would come over for board recreation nights and thought I used to be a graphic designer, as a result of who else might make these?”
Lundquist provides that these are the kinds of issues that may make folks actually enthusiastic about internet hosting. “If the matches are what makes you excited to host and invite folks over, hell yeah, make the matches and let that be the entryway to getting all the things else,” she says. I like to prepare dinner, but it surely’s imagining the tablescape that thrills me about having the feast.
For my pal Alison, the dream, she says—particularly as a result of her customized matchbooks have a extra elusive design with out her identify—could be to listen to a rumor of individuals speaking about her mysterious matchbook, like they may focus on for an if-you-know-you-know type of restaurant. A spot so good, its glory spreads by phrase of mouth. So, in fact, customized matchbooks for the house reveal the impacts of branding tradition—and the efficiency of self intensified by social media—on our private aesthetics. However we restaurant-house folks make sacrifices for the general public. A sanctuary must be within the protected hills; a restaurant is on the road degree and able to be acknowledged. A restaurant should entice and shock and be beneficiant. And memorable!
High photograph courtesy Templi
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