That was the feeling on an idyllic summer evening this past week in the Hamptons, when we gathered to celebrate the PORTA x Tess Newall Ottoline Collection around a table set exactly as it was intended: in good light, with better company.
A summer evening in the Hamptons
Gatherings
When likeminds come together, to eat and drink and pass the salt, something ephemeral feels captured — like lightning bugs in a jar.
Long tables threaded through a grove of birch trees, dressed in linen as the light dropped gold, then blue. At each place: a plate hand-painted for the occasion, swirls of cerulean and terracotta, no two quite alike — and a monogrammed cup of brushes and paint, an invitation to leave your own mark before the night was through.
Perhaps our favorite detail from the evening was the tablecloth, stretched the length of the table like a canvas — painted by Tess Newall's own hand.
Alongside it all sat the Ottoline Collection, the pieces themselves practically part of the menu. Painted in Portugal, each plate carries its own small imperfection — a looser brushstroke, a swirl that bends slightly off course — the same human touch found on the faience Tess has studied for years.
It's a language she picked up first at Charleston, wandering the same Sussex rooms where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once painted every surface they could reach — mantels, cupboards, the sides of a bathtub — refusing to believe a plate was less worthy of attention than a canvas. Tess has spent nearly a decade carrying that same instinct into orangeries, murals, and old war rooms turned studios. The Ottoline Collection is that instinct set down on a dinner table: made in two palettes, Azure and Terracotta, designed to be mixed and layered until the whole table looks like it was gathered slowly, over years, rather than set out for one night.
The night's abundant produce came from Amber Waves Farm, the beloved Amagansett nonprofit growing over 500 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers just a few miles down the road.
The meal itself came to life in the hands of The Culinistas, longtime collaborators whose cooking always finds the right note between effortless and exact.
Chandon's spritz caught the last amber light in the glass, dressed with dried citrus and rosemary, while Stel+Mar kept pouring long after the sun went down.
Set the table, and paint it too:
