Laurel Gallucci

The Sweet Laurel Bakery co-founder discusses how a health scare led to her burgeoning business.

By Lindzi Scharf

Photography by Birdie Thompson

“I started to spiral downward out of control,” Laurel Gallucci says, recalling the story of how – in the throes of a medical crisis – she had no intention of launching a business. And yet, eight years later, her name is synonymous with Sweet Laurel Bakery, a healthy Los Angeles-based baked goods brand that has a cult following that includes Mandy Moore, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Lauren Conrad.

“Sweet Laurel is a result of my healing through food journey,” says the former teacher and mother of two boys, standing in an immaculately curated kitchen inside her Santa Monica home. “I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2012. I treated it medically for about a year, but I had to quit my job as a school teacher because I had no energy. I was tired all the time.”

Two years into Gallucci’s health crisis, her body stopped responding to the synthetic hormone treatments she’d been prescribed and she lost forty pounds in two months. While she had been told there wasn’t a cure for her condition, Gallucci was determined to better manage her symptoms. She met with a doctor who advised her to try a different – and potentially life-changing – diet.

“With the autoimmune disease that I have, which is Hashimoto's disease, it’s imperative to not eat grains, especially gluten, refined sugar, or dairy,” Gallucci says, explaining the disorder causes her body’s antibodies to attack her thyroid. “I started to work with a functional integrative medical doctor who said, ‘You need to go 100 percent Paleo for a year. You will feel a huge difference and you’ll feel so good that you won’t want to eat that stuff anymore.’”

She quit gluten, sugar, and dairy – cold turkey. Sure enough, Gallucci began to feel better. Eventually, her lifelong love of baking inspired her to experiment with recipes of her own that incorporated her unique dietary restrictions.

“I brought these baked goods [I’d made] to a housewarming party one day,” she remembers. “My good friend Claire Thomas, who is my Sweet Laurel co-founder, was like, ‘This is delicious. What is this?’ I told her, ‘It’s grain-free, refined sugar-free, dairy-free cake.’ She did not believe me. She was like, ‘Wow, gluten-free does not taste like this. This is special.’”

Gallucci and Thomas – who have known each other since their college years – went into business together in 2015. Gallucci remembers, “Claire was the one who was like, ‘Laurel, you have a story. This story is going to resonate with people. I see a brand. I see a cookbook. I see a store.’ She saw all of it.”

Gallucci admits Thomas saw it long before she did. But having reached a crossroads professionally, Gallucci decided to take a sugar-free leap of faith. “We started the brand with an Instagram account,” she says. “It instantly got people engaged. We grew our following quickly and I think it was because education has always been the cornerstone of the brand. An important facet of it was to be open and honest and share all of our recipes.”

In just one year, Thomas’s vision came to fruition. Looking back, Gallucci says her childhood love of baking and teaching proved to be the perfect ingredients for the business she and Thomas cooked up.

THE EARLY YEARS

Gallucci grew up as one of seven children in Santa Monica, California. “I grew up in a big family,” she says. “I always thought I was going to be a school teacher. I would do pretend school at home. I had a little grade book. I was always into teaching. But baking was my favorite hobby. I did my fifth-grade science experiment on the effect of yeast on bread baking.”

She attended UCLA where she studied history as an undergrad. During that time, she met her close friend turned business partner Thomas. “We bonded over baking and old movies and books,” she says. “We’re basically 95-year-old nerds and so we took knitting and gardening classes together. She has an appreciation for old Hollywood films just as much as I do, so we would go to screenings and would throw tea parties. We had so much in common.”

After graduating from UCLA in 2008, Gallucci attended Pepperdine University in Malibu, where she earned her master's in education. She started her career as a high school history teacher. “My first year of teaching, I was terrified of my students,” she says, laughing. “I was teaching 11th and 12th graders at Venice High School and some of them were three years younger than me. Some of them were 18 or 19 and I was terrified of them.”

She eventually found her footing, then transferred to an elementary school in Beverly Hills. “I loved it,” she says. “It was so fulfilling.”

HER HEALTH JOURNEY

At 27 years old, Gallucci was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease and realized her job was taking its toll on her health. “I taught for five years,” she says. “When I got sick, I had to stop. I wasn’t having a [menstrual] cycle. I was having all these issues and I took a step back and was like, ‘I don’t have the energy to work right now.’ My dad who is [a cardiologist] said, ‘You cannot put your health off another year.’ So I took a break even though I was relatively young.”

Shortly after, a doctor recommended trying a Paleolithic diet to help combat her symptoms. Gallucci recalls the doctor saying, “And that means no chocolate cake.” She laughs at the memory. “That was the final thing she said to me. I’d tried a lot of different things at this point. I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to do it. I’m going to try this diet.’ So overnight I went grain-free, refined sugar-free, and dairy-free. I made all my food for every single meal. This was 2014 when people were not eating this way and you couldn’t go to the grocery store and find [what you needed]. So I learned how to make my food. My husband was a doll and joined me and ate whatever I was eating, which was helpful.”

As Gallucci navigated her new norm, she says, “I didn’t realize how important baked goods were to me. I changed my diet so quickly, but I started to miss baking for people. I think my love language is gift giving but it’s baked goods gift giving. It’s a hyper-specific love language. I realized quickly, ‘I want to bring cookies to my brother’s house. I need to figure this out.’”

“I started to rekindle my love for baking but through this new diet change,” Gallucci continues. “I had been a lifelong baker, but obviously I didn’t want to have flour and sugar in my house, so I started baking with ingredients that I could eat. I did some research and started reading about alternative grain-free flour, and refined sugar-free sweeteners, and put together a list of ingredients that I could eat and started formulating recipes using that. I started with cookies, went to brownies, went to cake, and was baking all the time again.”

Cut to: her friend Thomas tried her diet-friendly cake and couldn’t believe it was healthy. She urged Gallucci to go into business with her. “She saw what was going on with me and with my health,” Gallucci remembers. “She said, ‘I want to share [your story]. I feel like there’s so much that can come from [this]. I see it. This is what we’re doing.’”

Gallucci remembers telling Thomas, “First of all, I’m still sick. And second of all, that sounds really tiring.’” But Gallucci trusted Thomas and followed her lead. “Claire is the big-picture, visionary in our business partnership. She’s one of those people that’s good at so many different things. She’s a food stylist and a commercial director; she has a huge understanding of branding and how powerful it is. Coming from school teaching, I didn’t know what a brand was. I didn’t even wear branded clothing. I was always more of a vintage consignment shopper and she was talking to me about brands. I was like, ‘What do you mean? A bakery can’t be a brand, can it?’ I was naïve, but she had this vision and was like, ‘Let’s just try this.’”

THE LAUNCH OF SWEET LAUREL BAKERY

The duo launched Sweet Laurel Bakery in February 2015 with an Instagram account that shared Gallucci’s story and recipes. “We instantly had this grassroots community in L.A. supporting us,” she says. “I was making cakes out of my home at the time and I was delivering them to people’s doors. I was meeting our customers and our community members. We hosted classes and workshops on how to nourish yourself if you’re eating grain-free, dairy-free, refined-sugar free.”

Gallucci was shocked by the response. “It was making a difference in their lives,” she says. “People would come up to me at workshops, crying, saying, ‘I haven’t had a brownie in seven years. I didn’t think I could ever do this.’ Seeing that it was doing a service for people and helping people has helped me go forward every day because I know there are so many people being touched by the brand.”

Gallucci credits her Sweet Laurel community as having helped her build the business she has today. “The coolest thing is – since day one – we’ve had this group of people trying to heal,” she says. “Whether they have celiac [disease] or diabetes, they want to nourish themselves per the condition they have. That’s about fifty percent of our customer base. The other fifty percent are people that just want the feel-good delicious option that doesn’t make them feel guilty. So that’s how we started and things happened quickly.”

As a result, the early days are a bit of a blur. “Honestly, I was still healing,” she reflects. “I was still in year one of trying this new diet. I was feeling better every day but I still wasn’t a hundred percent. I knew I had something, but I didn’t know how much influence it could potentially have.”

One year after Sweet Laurel’s launch, Gallucci and Thomas got their first cookbook deal. “Sweet Laurel: Recipes for Whole Food, Grain-Free Desserts” was published in 2018. They published their second book, “Sweet Laurel Savory: Everyday Decadence for Whole-Food, Grain-Free Meals,” in 2021; and true to Thomas’s vision, they opened their first retail store in 2019.

THE LIFE PARTNER

While Thomas is Gallucci’s work wife, Gallucci also often collaborates with her husband, Nick Gallucci, a sustainability designer and engineer by trade. “He has a full-time job but helps me with Sweet Laurel,” she says. “He redid our website. He’s a backend guy. He did the store. Claire did the interior design of the cake shop, but he did the guts, the electrical, plumbing, all of that.”

She and Mr. Gallucci met through her siblings in 2011. “He was friends with my brother and my sister and then he kind of worked his way into meeting me through them,” she says, laughing. “He started attending the church that I grew up at. He worked his way into our circle.”

Fittingly, the couple bonded over food and it was love at first bite. “Our first date was cooking,” she says. “He was like, ‘Do you want to help me make pasta for all of our friends?’ because we had a lot of mutual friends. I said, ‘Sure. I’ll bring some bread and some cookies.’ He thought I was going to go to the store and buy bread and cookies, but I made them. On our second date, I made him banana bread and he was like, ‘We have to get married because this banana bread is my favorite bread. This is a sign.’ That’s why in the cookbook we have ‘Fall in Love Banana Bread’ because that was his favorite thing.” They got married one year later in 2012. “For our wedding, we made three hundred loaves of heart-shaped banana bread for every wedding guest.”

HER PATH TO MOTHERHOOD

The couple had their first son, Nico, in 2017. But it took them time to get there. “For four years, I had secondary amenorrhea, which means I wasn’t having a cycle,” Gallucci explains. “It was part of my autoimmune issues and my healing issues. It was one of those things where I got really scared, like, ‘I don’t know if I’m able to have children.’ It was frightening. For a couple of years, my health journey was focused on cycling again. I was trying to get my cycle to come back naturally. I tried hormones and they made me feel sick, so I didn’t want to do that. I was at my wit’s end and I’ll never forget this…”

As she’s telling the story, her youngest son, Cal, enters the room and puts his head on her lap. They share an unspoken bonding moment as she retells the story of her journey to motherhood.

“The year I turned thirty – on my actual birthday – I had an appointment with my nutritionist,” Gallucci says. “She gave me a bad report in terms of what my hormones were like because I got my blood work done. We reviewed them at the beginning of May and she said, ‘Honestly, the hormones are staying the same. They’re not changing too much.’ And at the end of May, I got pregnant with my first, so sometime that May of my thirtieth birthday something happened and I got pregnant.”

She still doesn’t know how it happened, but she does remember she was afraid to get too excited at the time. “I wasn’t super confident in my body’s ability to do it,” she says. “At first, I was like, ‘How am I going to carry this child to term if I haven’t had a cycle in four years?’ It was a miracle. I carried him all the way. He’s a healthy kid and after my cycle came back like clockwork. I was healed. My autoimmune disease has been in remission since I got pregnant with him. I say he healed me. It was the cherry on top of my healing journey.”

Gallucci gave birth to her three-year-old son, Cal, in January 2020. “He’s a super healthy, happy baby,” she says. “He came out during a one-hour labor. I was crowning in the car, which was not fun. But I didn’t know it was going to be so fast. My first baby was an eighteen-hour labor.”

THE WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Gallucci admits it’s been a learning curve balancing work with motherhood. “I had a lot of stereotypes going into it,” she says. “People would be like, ‘Are you going to get childcare?’ For whatever reason, I thought, ‘I can work and have a baby. This is easy. I don’t need childcare. I can do it.’ That lasted about three months. Once they start crawling, it’s [impossible].”

Gallucci had to come to terms with the fact that her path would differ from her mother’s experience. “The hardest thing for me was realizing that I wasn’t going to be what my mom was—which was a stay-at-home mom,” she says. “In my head, I thought that’s what I was going to be.”

As the co-founder of a thriving business, Gallucci is learning to walk the tightrope of working mothers who have come before her. “Balancing the two has been the most challenging thing in my life,” she says. “I feel pressure to work all the time but then also be a super-engaged, loving mother and not ignore them. It’s emotional for me and hard to deal with. I have to take it day by day. I’m working with an awesome therapist on this because it’s been the most challenging thing—having a business and balancing the type of mom I want to be. It’s managing my expectations and making sure I’m spending enough time with them but then also spending the time I need on my company.”

Gallucci says she’s found the key is to establish boundaries. “I’ve set rules for myself,” she says. “I don’t travel overnight unless it’s necessary. I went the extra mile to do a day trip to Las Vegas a couple of Fridays ago. I left at three am. I came back at five pm. It was for a production run. I needed to be there but I was like, ‘I’m not spending the night.’ So I left at three am.”

Cal chimes in. “Yeah, but you came back.”

“Yeah, I came back,” she echoes. “Sometimes I feel like my anxiety about all of this – through osmosis – is put on them and they react to me strongly if I leave; whereas, with my friends’ kids, it’s like, ‘Oh, bye. Whatever.’ And I think, ‘How are your kids cool with you leaving?’ They sense my stress.”

IT’S ALL FULL CIRCLE

While Gallucci never intended to leave her profession as a teacher, she relishes the fact that she’s been able to scratch that itch through her company. “The cool full circle thing is that I’ve been able to teach through Sweet Laurel,” she says. “It’s been a medium for education for so many people. That’s why we have such a focus on it with weekly videos. We’re always trying to engage the community through the education medium.”

She’s amazed to realize how her background has contributed to the company’s foundation. “I see how what I do now was germinating [years ago],” Gallucci says, explaining she often found a way to incorporate baking into her lessons at school. “I would bake with my students. We’d do projects. I remember we were learning about sedimentary rocks and we made sedimentary rock cookies. There was a base layer and a crumb layer and a top layer. I was always doing fun baking things [at school]. It’s interesting how everything happens for a reason.”

Gallucci says teaching also prepared her for the forward-facing component of Sweet Laurel. “I’m grateful for my time as a school teacher because now I do a lot of public speaking engagements,” she says. “It’s so helpful to feel confident when you’re speaking in front of people. I don’t get nervous because teaching made me comfortable.”

She does, however, admit she has had to overcome other challenges – like following her intuition. “The thing that I work on the most is being assertive,” Gallucci says. “That was something I struggled with for so long. Running a company and being confident in what you’re doing takes a lot of confidence. That’s something I’m growing into because it doesn’t come naturally to me. I have to work on it – making sure that I’m not letting the things I’m self-conscious about stop me from doing what I think or know is the right thing to do. I look forward to continuing to grow as a leader.”

WHAT’S NOW & NEXT

Gallucci and Thomas found a way to pivot during the pandemic. “We needed to reach our customers in a different way, which is why we put a lot into our e-commerce,” she says. “We started shipping everything nationwide. That is the biggest part of our business to date but launching [our grocery store products] is going to catapult us into having more brand awareness. The grocery store is lacking this [type of product]. There are options, but they’re not doing it the way Sweet Laurel is doing it. We’re excited to be more accessible.”

While Sweet Laurel has a cult following in California, Gallucci’s ultimate goal is to reach as many health enthusiasts with a sweet tooth as possible. “I would love to see Sweet Laurel be a nationwide grocery store brand,” she says, sharing that Sweet Laurel will now be available at Sprouts nationwide in addition to a number of Erewhon Market locations in California. Grocery store expansion is the company’s main goal right now. “That is going to be how we can become part of everyone’s household, hopefully, one day. Not everyone can pay to ship a cake nationwide but they can buy cake mix that’s grain-free, dairy-free, and refined-sugar free. It’s clean, healthy, delicious, and life-changing. It’s Betty Crocker meets healthy. That’s what I’m hoping for and I’m stoked.”

Gallucci says she’s living her purpose and has learned to celebrate every struggle as well as every moment of triumph – big and small – along the way. “[I’m touched] any time somebody shares what Sweet Laurel has done for them,” she says. “I’ve met a lot of people who have said, ‘When you said this to me or shared this with me years ago, it helped.’ Hearing things like that is what helps me. I genuinely want to help people and want to be a resource.”

While Gallucci’s plate is full (no pun intended), she recognizes she’s in a privileged position as she lives her dream. “I feel blessed,” she says. “When I have hard days at Sweet Laurel, my husband reminds me, ‘You’re in a position where you can influence people in such a positive way,’ and I remember—in the little morsels that I’ve been able to share with people that changed their life—that’s really what being a teacher is. It’s special.”

HOW SHE LIVES…

“Our home is a combination of what my husband and I both love,” Gallucci says, as she cuts flowers in the garden of the Santa Monica home she, her husband, and two children moved into in 2019. “Because my husband is a sustainability designer and engineer, our entire house is net zero. We have solar. We have repurposed water. Getting chickens was another step in the direction of us trying to be resourceful. We chop up the veggie scraps every night after dinner and give them to the chicks. It’s a fun little system. It works for our family.”

Before their current residence, The Galluccis lived in Benedict Canyon. “It was a silent film actress’s hunting lodge,” she explains as the scent of basil fills the air. “Mary Pickford’s hunting lodge was on the same street where our house was. When I got sick, we thought, ‘We should move back to the westside to be with family and friends.’ The beach has always been centering for me, so we rented our house out and moved here. We were actually in an apartment for a long time and then we were able to get this house and we did renovations. The timing was great because when we moved back to the westside, we started Sweet Laurel shortly thereafter.” She adds, “My husband was the reason we were able to remodel this house in four months. We gutted it too. He was here every day at six am when all the people came and then he came when work was over and checked in on everything. He was on top of it. We were looking at photos last night. We took this house down to the sticks—all the drywall came out, all the plumbing, the electrical. He’s good at stuff like that.”

HER FAMILY

Gallucci and her two boys (Nico, 6; Cal, 3) live close to her six siblings and parents. “Everyone still lives here,” she says. “We have cousin playdates all the time. It’s amazing. My parents still live in the house I grew up in, so we commune there every weekend. It’s fun. The kids are all close. I was asking my husband, ‘How do we instill in our children the importance of living super close to us as they get older?’”

THE KITCHEN

“It’s relaxing,” Gallucci says. “When people come over, they’re like, ‘Wow. We can take a deep breath.’ It’s got a zen-vibe.”

FARM TO TABLE

“These are eggs from our chicks,” Gallucci says, holding them out. “My husband has always wanted chickens and I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ We had designed this garden to be like an English countryside garden. We debated, ‘Where are we going to put the coop? Is it going to mess with our aesthetic?’ We were able to create a design that worked for the house and also gave them space to do their thing. We like to let them free-range every day and we get so many eggs.”

SHARING IS CARING

“We give a lot of stuff away,” she says. “We have our lime bucket outside. Whenever we have an excess of anything, we put it out there and our neighbors take whatever. I love sharing. We’ve got a lot of citrus. Our veggie beds sometimes give us amazing things.”

THE CHICKS

“We have seven chickens,” Gallucci says. “Their names are constantly changing but at the moment my oldest calls them all by the color they are—so we have Goldie, Bluey, all these different names. They’re really sweet. We got them as chicks and so we got to raise them. We got them at the Malibu Feed Bin. The people that work there know everything about chickens; we knew nothing. Any time we’re driving by, we stop and chat and learn more and we check in on any siblings that still live there. They have chickens from babies to roosters. We like to do field trips there with the kids.”

A LOVE OF GARDENING

“One of my top hobbies is gardening,” she says. “When we moved in, we had one veggie bed. Over the pandemic, we got five more. We built them in places where they fit. In between work calls and meetings, I like to go out there and garden or water or pick some stuff. It’s become my favorite hobby. I’ve been growing a lot of stuff and learning about plants. I’ve always loved gardening. My dad instilled that in me. We had a garden growing up. We get to try new things and the kids love being involved in it.”

THE PLATES

“All of the vintage pieces have a story—where I picked them up or who gave them to me,” Gallucci says. “My now business partner [Thomas] gave me the faith/hope/charity plates as a bridal shower gift. We’ve been friends for fifteen years now. It’s funny how full circle everything has come.”

THE CURATION

“When we designed the house, we knew we were going to do the floating shelves,” Gallucci says. “I’ve never been a collector, so when we moved in here, I needed to source some of the things I didn’t have. We picked a lot of stuff up at cool antique shops. There’s a good thrift store close to here called The Colleagues of Beverly Hills— and everything goes to benefit a children’s non-profit [called Children’s Institute, Inc, which aims to end child abuse and neglect]. The women there have the coolest stuff.”

THE INSPIRATION

“I’ve always collected vintage cookbooks,” Gallucci says. “They’re all so good. Both of our cookbooks and our baking mixes were designed to mirror a vintage cookbook.”

THE CHINA

“My mom’s wedding china is pink and white,” Gallucci says. “So I’ve always been attracted to that. My mom’s thing is china. That’s probably where I got my eye for it. She had a lot of it growing up.”

THE TEA CUPS

“I’ve got lots of tea cups,” she says. “This was my great-grandmother’s tea set. These are called ‘luncheon plates.’ I have a bunch of these in a drawer. These are over a hundred years old. They’re super fun. I love the detail. My aunt gave them to me after I started Sweet Laurel. She was like, ‘I’m going to give you your great grandmother’s tea china because it matches your brand. I’m so glad that these are finding a happy home.’ They’re special.”

THE COLLECTION

“I’m throwing a tea party for my mom’s birthday on Saturday and all her sisters are coming, so I’m going to use [a lot of this china],” she says. “They’re going to be excited. I love to use all of the tea cups. We have a lot of my personal tea cups at the cake shop, too.”

THE GIFT

“I collect cake plates,” she says. “I had this bad habit of letting people borrow them and then I’d never see them again. I’m starting to not let people borrow them. They’re easy to replace though through eBay and Etsy. Whenever I need something hyper-specific—like a vintage cake plate with laurel leaf gold—you can find it there.” She adds, “The owner [Jodi Shays] of Queen Bee in Culver City and Brentwood is a good friend of mine and she moved to Dallas to open a Queen Bee salon there and she gave me that. She said, ‘I know you’re the one person who will use it.’”

THE DISPLAY

“This is gorgeous,” she says. “I have a bunch of different sets. We sell tea cups at Sweet Laurel, too.”

THE COFFEE CLOSET

“This is my husband’s coffee closet,” Gallucci says. “It’s very over-the-top. If you want an espresso shot, I can make it for you. Coffee is his thing. He and my mom have a special connection. Every time she comes over, he’s like, ‘Mom, can I make you a latte?’ He grabs a cup and makes her a latte.”

THE CORNER WINDOW

“I like reading here,” she says. “It’s also nice because if my kids are playing outside, I can keep an eye on them from here. This window corner came from a house that I’ve always loved in Santa Monica that’s a couple of blocks from where I grew up. They had this two-story window corner that was identical to this. When we were designing the house, I took a photo of it and we basically copied it. It turns out that the person who used to live there was Rachel Ashwell and she’s a friend of mine now. I was telling her about my house and was like, ‘There was this house that I’m obsessed with and we copied the window.’ She was like, ‘I used to live there. I built that house.’ Of course, she did.” She and Ashwell met through Sweet Laurel. “We worked with Shabby Chic when the first book came out,” Gallucci says. “Our first book was sold there and the first round of aprons that we sold at Sweet Laurel were from Shabby Chic. A lot of the floral prints are fun.” Gallucci adds, “I have an affinity for anything with UK flavor and I was attracted to how she was combining different things from her culture growing up. She sources all her stuff from the most random antique stores in America.”

THE DOOR

“This is a Dutch door,” she says. “It’s my favorite thing ever.”

THE OUTFIT

“This is from Sezane,” she says, referencing her top. “It’s a French company but they’re super sustainable. They have classic, beautiful designs. They’re not over-the-top expensive, which is why I love them. They have a classic vibe, which I’m all about. I love when stuff has a vintage feel but it’s modern and feminine.”

THE LIVING ROOM

“My children run wild in here,” she says. “We added the fireplace to make this pop even a little bit more.”

THE PAINTING

“When we were building the house, my husband’s grandparents offered him a painting from his great-grandfather,” Gallucci says. “His great-grandfather was an impressionist artist who primarily painted on the east coast but then relocated to the west coast and this is a painting of a port in New Harbor, Maine. I love the nautical feel and the color palette. Harbors are fun passageways. This is the most special part of the living room.”

THE SILHOUETTE

“There’s this amazing guy—Karl Johnson who has a company called Cut Arts and he does profiles,” Gallucci says. “He turned this profile into a necklace for me, which I wear all the time. I’m going to have him do my secondborn’s profile because I don’t have his yet. I’m definitely making that into a necklace. It’s my favorite necklace. It’s a gold medallion circle. He does beautiful work. He does this all hand scissoring. My son was one and a half at the time and he was able to do that, which is fascinating.”

THE VINTAGE BOOKS

“These are books that I’ve enjoyed,” Gallucci says. “I like historical fiction. I have a book club at Sweet Laurel and every month we switch off between a historical fiction piece and a health and healing book.”

THE HATS

“I’m a hat person,” she says, referencing a rack that holds hats by Janessa Leone and Louise Green.

THE ARTWORK

“My business partner Claire is an interior designer amongst all of her other strengths,” she says. “When we did the house, she brought in a lot of cool partnership opportunities—the art, the floors, the counters, the paint. We worked with Society6. They do cool art. They print it and frame it. I’m into landscapes, garden roses, and the beach, which is my centering place.”

THE OUTDOORS

“Because I have this outdoor space, I hosted five baby showers and a couple of birthday parties during COVID,” she says. “We’ve done some Sweet Laurel stuff here outside, too. I love entertaining as long as I have people helping me on the prep side. And obviously, it’s fully catered by Sweet Laurel.”

THE FOUNTAIN

“When we did the backyard, we wanted the kids to be able to run laps,” she says. “My husband was like, ‘It would be so fun to have a drinking fountain outside.’ I loved the idea. We were at the Pasadena Architectural Salvage, which is a must-see. They take cool things from old buildings and sell them. This was an art deco drinking fountain from Cal Tech. You can see the art deco quality. My husband is into science, so a Cal Tech drinking fountain? He was like, ‘We need it.’ It was a fun find. We love it. We put a water filter back there. We fill up the kids' water bottles and they drink from there.”

THE ROSE ARCH

“The rose arch was a fun idea,” Gallucci says. “I wanted to merge the house with the garage. My husband had the idea to build it on this greenhouse scaffold that we had someone come over and weld. Our landscape architect recommended the Cecile Brunner rose. This is a vigorous climber. This thing took over the arch in literally a year. My husband would come out every night when it started to get longer and attach it. It took over and now it’s a beautiful shaded area for all the entertaining we do. Then at night, we have lights, which is fun.”

THE ROOMMATES

“The chickens love to be part of the show,” she says with a laugh. One squawks right on cue. “They’re hilarious. Every time I come out here, they’re like, ‘Can we come outside?’ They love it. A lot of chicken coops have automatic gates that open and close when the sun sets and rises because they know to go to bed when the sun sets. But I get so nervous that a creature will crawl in here, so I don’t want to do that quite yet. I didn’t think they would be so social.”

She says they’ve had the chickens for over a year. “They’re so fun,” Gallucci says. “They boss each other around. We were watching this YouTube video and it said, ‘Pretend you’re doing what they’re doing and they’ll come up to you.’ We’ve learned a lot. They make a certain noise when they’re laying eggs. They hop out. They know they’re not supposed to though. Silly girls.”