Laura Regensdorf, writer
Sensory People is an interview series about the specific, sometimes unexpected things that help people find comfort & beauty in daily life. It's the questions I always want to ask — and the reminders we all need.
This week: writer Laura Regensdorf. Vogue and Vanity Fair alum, now writing for T Magazine, Neptune Papers, and AD — her latest piece for T is about how to make friends as an adult.
Ten years ago, when we'd just moved to America, I cold-emailed Laura, and we went for coffee. She was the beauty editor at Vogue, and I guess I expected someone interested in surface. Instead, she wanted to talk about memento mori, death, dancing, art. Not a word about work. Her writing is exactly like that. She goes past the obvious, and you always come away feeling a little changed. More alive.
What's a feeling you're always wanting more of in life?
Spaciousness is the word that comes to mind, in just about every sense. There’s a physical aspect, the way your stride takes on a new looseness after a ballet class; the opposite is a state of feeling trapped in your body—a too-small container further cinched by this ongoing brace against winter. I’m definitely looking for spaciousness in scheduling. I have a tendency to take on too much, driven by enthusiasm and curiosity and the freelancer’s disinclination to say no. The result is sometimes akin to living on the last two inches of the treadmill. I finally made it to the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA this weekend, joining the eleventh-hour throngs. She was so interested in the fullness of voids—something she linked to her early calligraphy studies, according to one of the wall texts. In that meditative practice, “you’re not watching what your brush is doing, but you’re watching the spaces around it,” Asawa said. “You’re watching what it isn’t doing, so that you’re taking care of both the negative space and the positive space.”
What are your favorite sensory objects?
My first thought is, strangely, a car—a prototypical American answer! I haven’t had one since high school, after which I moved to New York, though I grew up seeing my used blue Ford Explorer (and every rental car since) as a means of autonomy and exploration. One of my favorite sensations is moving from air-conditioning into a blazing hot car, and your whole body erupts into a kind of heat shimmer, like the inverse of goosebumps. I recently bought an antique Steuben vase that has a subtle iridescent effect, like an aura reading trapped in glass. Last summer I filled it with deep red coxcomb—which has the romance of a brain sample rendered in velvet—and some fuzzy green scabiosa. I like to shop the flower market with that interplay of texture and palette in mind.
What scents instantly comfort you?
I love the smell of calamondin blossoms. It’s a type of Jawbreaker-size citrus, and I grew up with a giant tree in the backyard of our house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. My mom used to make (and still does upon request) a calamondin cake from the Junior League cookbook that involved yellow cake mix and blended peels. Perfectly imperfect. I received my own little tree as a gift sometime around lockdown, and now also tend some little saplings descended from my mom’s fruit. When my tree blooms, it’s heaven—and somehow amazing to me that a citrus tree remembers how to behave in a Brooklyn apartment. That and coffee. A security blanket for the deadline-haunted.
What emotion or memory would you bottle if you could?
Two and a half years ago, I did a rather paltry round of egg freezing and returned home to a tiny puppy in my living room. It was a funny confluence of events: a surgery meant to offer the someday possibility of caretaking and the arrival of the Texas hound mix I spontaneously decided to foster. One friend picked me up from the Midtown clinic per the post-anesthesia requirement, and another gamely scooped up Pina (then Liberty) from the van drop-off point in Bushwick. She was the size of a loaf of bread, with enormous floppy ears. It was the purest Christmas-morning feeling of my life. (And then I quickly realized I needed to roll up the rug.)
What words, things, people or places bring you back to yourself?
Movement, unequivocally. My work keeps me in my head, locked in the wrong kind of chair pose, and the best undoing is through dance or yoga. The physicality is a big part of it—the circulation of breath and blood scrubbing like a pipe cleaner through unseen channels. But it’s even more so about the focus on choreography or alignment. I haven’t yet figured out how to keep a meditation practice, but I find stillness in motion. My other love is being in a theater. Sitting in the dark, enveloped by music, making sense of whatever performance is unfolding onstage—there is nothing like it. Your attention is focused but your thoughts float along, making new associations. A communal moment designed for hyperpersonal engagement.
What's your favorite BODHA and why?
I have a soft spot for the perfume you created with Building Block’s Kimberly and Nancy Wu a few years back, which came with a slim holder in vegetable-tanned leather. It hangs off my tote bag (a Building Block sibling) and offers that kind of immediate back-of-taxi sensory shift—dry leather notes with pink peppercorn and incense. But in terms of an everyday essential, it has to be the Tenderness incense. I love the gesture of lighting a stick, with its implied duration. It feels like an egg timer of calm.
