In the Kitchen With Golde Cofounder Trinity Mouzon Wofford

Trinity Mouzon Wofford thinks about the intersection of food, home, and well-being a lot. She founded the superfood brand Golde with her husband Issey Kobori in 2017, and is the author of the recently published cookbook Eating at Home: The Nourishing Practice of Everyday Cooking, an ode to unhurried and intentionally prepared meals. Mouzon Wofford also writes the newsletter "From Home", where she muses on Upstate New York life as an entrepreneur and mom to two young daughters. To her, home—and the kitchen specifically—is where her heart is.

Mouzon Wofford and Kobori landed in the Hudson Valley in 2021. The move happened to coincide with the pandemic, but the couple, former high school sweethearts, grew up an hour north in Saratoga Springs. Mouzon Wofford herself comes from a fourth-generation Upstate family, so returning to rural roots felt natural after the couple wrapped up their time in Brooklyn. They found a "real proper Victorian style home" built in 1865, says Mouzon Wofford, "which makes it the oldest house on our street."

The facade of the house was enchanting, and it reminded the couple of the homes they were raised in. Mouzon Wofford describes Saratoga as "basically a Victorian city, where all the houses are meticulously preserved." Once these kinds of homes are registered historical, homeowners aren’t even allowed to choose their own paint colors; that’s how strict the rules are.

But their Hudson Victorian had not been historically preserved. While there are reminders of 18th-century charms, the interior had already been gutted and flipped two owners prior. "I was heartbroken by how much of the house was sterile-white and didn’t have the character our neighbors had told us [about] later on," says Mouzon Wofford. The kitchen had bare walls, dreaded boob lights installed above, and standard cabinets and storage. "There was a lot of grief on my end of these decisions that were made," she continues.

The silver lining Mouzon Wofford came around to embracing, however, was that since everything had been altered before her and Kobori’s time, they were unburdened by any desire or need to further renovate; it’s as if they stepped into a clean slate. The couple decided to keep everything as is and make DIY changes that purposefully made their kitchen feel more lived-in and vintage—bringing in richer tones, adding antique pieces, and filling in the nooks and crannies with personal knickknacks—to remove that feeling of "walking through a condo."

Mouzon Wofford also found ways to make the kitchen more functional for her slower-paced cooking practice, such as dedicating a space for an indoor herb garden (ideal during the winter months) and a fermentation station (to relish the process of creating ingredients deliberately), and finding ways to display and have commonly used items within reach (rather than store them away every time).

Since "cooking and making space for mealtime gives me a sense of spaciousness," Mouzon Wofford says, it was important for her to inject as much of herself into the kitchen. Opting out of fancy or modern upgrades, and bringing in almost exclusively secondhand or storied pieces, has been "a nice reminder that you can make a space very much your own without tearing everything out," she says. Ahead, Mouzon Wofford walks us through how she and Kobori aged up their renovated kitchen to better suit its Victorian lore.