As a child, Nell Diamond poured over her mother’s linen collection. She remembers arranging cocktail napkins on her bed and being granted certain pieces, which constituted her first collection. “I was an exciting child,” she laughs on the phone. “Of course, when I graduated college and was buying bedding on my own, I was really shocked that I could not find the quality I had seen in my mother’s products.”
While earning her MBA from Yale in 2015, Diamond began researching the bedding industry and the factors at play in its fabrication “When you go look at that big wall of sheets at Bed, Bath and Beyond, all the packages say the same things,” she says. “I wanted to sort through what that meant.” She took her 10,000 hours of research and translated it into Hill House Home, a luxury linens company aimed at her peers.
When Diamond launched in 2016, she created five collections, and has recently introduced a collection of rotating limited edition patterns and artist collaborations. “What I often see is that people are intimidated by the interior design process,” Diamond says. “They don’t feel like they know what they like or what their options are. I wanted to create choices that empowered rather than confused.”
To simplify things for her client, Diamond made all her sets the same price. “I wanted people feel like they were making a design decision,” she says. “I wanted them to select based on the aesthetic rather than for any price reason.”
In her own bedroom, Diamond likes to experiment with different aesthetics. “I’ve always come back to the bedroom as my safe place,” she says. “It’s the place where I can be the craziest with design and not be afraid.” She describes the bedroom of her childhood as excessively pink and covered with “so many rhinestones and feathers that you would die.”
While her affinity for pink has mellowed since moving in with husband, Teddy Wasserman, Diamond’s joyful and holistic approach to design remains unchanged. From online marketing to
packaging, she wants every inch of the Hill House Home experience to feel pleasurable. “As an e- commerce brand, you have very few touch points,” she says. “Even if someone is spending $80 with us, we want them to have that incredible packaging experience that feels delightful.”
Diamond listens to her customers to refine each point of contact. For the first year of Hill House Home, she responded personally to every customer email. When talking about the future, she mentions expansion into other soft goods—last year she introduced mini pillowcases, robes and pajamas—but she emphasizes that she plans to take her time. She wants each product Hill House Home introduces to have lasting value. “Everyone says people in our demographic are tied to buying experiences rather than things, but more so I think people want things that aren’t disposable,” she says. “I want Hill House Home to be a place where people find what they are looking for and feel good about it.”
