Rebecca Gardner’s Recipe for a Great Party? Booze, Music, a Sense of Humor—and a Wad of Cash

She can pack 40 happy guests into an apartment “the size of a nipple.”

The day is Thursday, maybe Friday, in Manhattan, and it’s early evening. Late summer, sultry. The week before, your phone had pinged with a text invite to a cocktail party at Rebecca Gardner’s Greenwich Village apartment. You’d only met her once, on an airplane. But the way she’d made that chance encounter sparkle inspired you to cut off work early and be here now, pulling open an ornate gold door on Fifth Avenue. That the 15-story prewar building began life as a hotel is fitting. Gardner is hospitality incarnate.

This welcoming spirit is why, just over a decade ago, at the age of barely 30, Gardner founded Houses & Parties, an events and interior design collective dedicated to her two greatest passions. Indeed, she so missed hosting during the pandemic that she added an e-commerce arm to her website, stocking it with anything “devotees of the elegant and unusual” might need for entertaining (and then some—as she likes to say, “I specialize in nonessentials”). When Gardner isn’t overseeing her 10-person firm and warehouse from her spacious home base in Savannah, Georgia, she’s here at her “teeny” pied-à-terre near Washington Square Park, staging parties for clients, or just for herself.

Getting off the elevator, you hear the sexy, nostalgic strains of the band Pink Martini wafting down the hallway. The door is unlocked. Gardner greets you, smiling and cracking a joke, takes your bag, and sets it by the refrigerator. The word teeny has more letters than there are rooms in this apartment—just one little bedroom, a modest sitting area, and a kitchen so small you could blink and miss it. There is also a closet reimagined as a full bar, from which the bartender hands you a vintage crystal tumbler filled with the house drink, Earl Grey Bourbon Punch, icy cold.

When asked to describe the place, Gardner says without skipping a beat, “turn-of-the-last-century brothel with a really fabulous madam,” then adds, laughing, “it is, after all, the size of a nipple.” The sitting room is painted “dirty lavender,” the two windows dressed in “egg-yolky” silk faille, and the floor covered in paprika carpet. At sunset, “the room looks like it’s on fire, and you feel like a great-looking leg might kick out from the curtains at any moment,” she says. Gardner hung the somber oil portraits of distant Eggleston ancestors (the photographer William Eggleston is a cousin) because “the South Texas gilt frames are so serious that they’re hysterical.” On a night like this one, 40 guests happily mingle, elbow to elbow. For more formal seated dinners she unfolds a table for eight in the bedroom.

Gardner has staged events for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, she planned her birthday parties all year long, piling on ideas until each year’s theme was more extravagant than the last, from “Pink Pigs, Green Frogs, BBQ Picnic Parade” to “Fashion Show Wedding,” which featured a local TV news broadcaster as M.C., friends stalking the catwalk (her parents’ driveway), and the birthday girl herself appearing at the end, a vision in white polyester.

Once a maximalist, always a maximalist, though over time Gardner has arrived at a few rules for her private fetes. Strong drinks, low lighting (“I avoid overhead lights like the plague”), simple and delicious foods (“never canapés—too fussy—just bar snacks and cheese puffs”), no paper napkins ever, and—above all—comfort. Also, per the late, great writer Julia Reed, an element of danger: pitchers of martinis for empty stomachs, or adding attractive single guests for a competitive game of “pass the orange.” Guest list? Come one, come all (she keeps a running list of potential invitees on her phone). And how does she take a measure of a party’s success? “When someone calls in the morning and tells me, ‘I had a screaming blast, I feel like hell,’” she says. Which happens every morning after, like clockwork. 

Rebecca Gardner’s Party 101

“Instead of a printed invitation, I usually send invites by text. I use Hi-Note, a stylish messaging app, to send them. I’m always meeting people I want to invite. Come one, come all—that embodies New York City to me.”

“I always host my parties on a Thursday or a Friday. People are more likely to let loose at the end of a workweek.”

“The real key to a party is to make sure guests are comfortable. That takes work. You need to make thoughtful introductions and help guests feel special, with drinks in their hands.”

“Parties are live theater. I make sure to have enough booze and music, and a sense of humor in case something goes wrong. A wad of cash helps too.”

“I don’t like canapés (too messy). I have all these French baskets, and I fill them with bar snacks, cheese, things like that. If guests linger, order pizza.”

This story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE

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