What Melissa Auf der Maur Can’t Live Without

There’s this eccentric couple I know — he is Croatian and she is Russian-Swedish — and they know everything about beverages, from the highest-grade matcha and kombucha to whiskey and gin. They’re this wizardly couple who I rely on for good recommendations. I’ve always been a matcha lover, but about a year ago, they turned me on to the highest-grade matcha. They live in Hudson now, but they used to live in London, where they were friends with this fancy tea dealer who told them about this matcha. A lot of people don’t know that matcha can hold a lot of heavy metals from rainwater and groundwater. Now I swear by it, and I am known in the Hudson tea and coffee shops as the lady who comes in with her own matcha in a tiny gold jar. But then one would wonder,Why aren’t you just having it at home?Because I like the ritual of going to a coffee shop, but I don’t wanna drink heavy metals. This matcha is superclean, but it’s also incredibly intense. It’s very, very sharp. My friends have also turned me on to this other way of drinking it, which is (when I drink matcha at home) with fresh citrus. It’s a vitamin-C citrus boost of antioxidants. It’s a very cool combo.

[Editor’s note: Lalani & Co lists all prices in pounds, so the price shown is an approximate conversion in U.S. dollars.]

This is a tasty protein snack that also encourages me to drink more water. If I’m on the go, I always have it at hand’s reach to get protein, inspire hydration, and, of course, deal with hunger. I found it at this spot where I charge my car between New York City and Hudson calledMom’s Organic Market, which is in Westchester. Many people who do the upstate commute know it. It’s a very healthy, very friendly-run co-op that’s somehow next to a Starbucks on the Saw Mill Parkway. It has the most incredible snack aisle I’ve ever seen in my life, just every possible chip and seaweed and nut that you would want. I have them in multiples in my pantry. I’ll be going on my book tour with them in my suitcase.

I am obviously a woman of the ’90s. The way that we listen to and discover music now is very different than when I was a young girl, and I often turn back to the ’80s. Most of my listening has a lot to do with my younger childhood, when I was falling in love with music, so I usually have more Depeche Mode and the Cure on in the background. But some of the new music I discover is through accidental algorithms. I don’t even know much about this artist, Deb Never, other than she’s a contemporary girl who I think makes music alone in her bedroom. Only some of the younger music journalists who I’ve been doing interviews with for my memoir seem to know her. She’s an up-and-coming underground musician who is a bit ’90s and ’80s meets home lo-fi Lonely Girl. I love it.

I am wearing them right now. I’ve always worn clogs, but clog boots were never my thing. Clogs are part of the stereotypical outfit for a lady upstate, so there’s a lot of ladies in clogs up here. No. 6 clogs have always been on my radar, but I started noticing lots of upstate friends wearing the shearling-lined ones. I wear clogs all year, and it used to be with wool socks, but now I get to just wear wool-sock clogs, and they’re so crazy-comfortable. I’m actually dreading the winter going away because I don’t wanna stop wearing them. They’re kind of like slipper clogs.

There was a very famous iconic clog shop in Hollywood called theClogmaster, which was way before No. 6 and all this stuff. It was the ’90s, and it was run by a Scandinavian woman who would do a form of your foot and custom-make clogs for you in every color. I had every favorite suede and leather color from the Clogmaster. I still wear some of them. They have lasted this long — that’s like 30 years. She was everyone in Hollywood’s favorite clog master and turned us all onto clogs, because if you didn’t come from Scandinavia, you had to wait for basically hipsters to start wearing clogs in the 2000s.

I am an au naturel beauty who never started having facials until last year at age 52 when I realized, oh fuck, I’ve been hiding upstate for 15 years and I’m gonna have to go on this book tour; what the fuck does my skin look like? All my fancy-glam ladies in Brooklyn were like,Oh, there’s red-light therapy, there’s oxidizationor whatever the fuck. I actually found a woman upstate who does really nice high-end facials, because otherwise you’re just going to the equivalent of the Body Shop or something. It’s nice, lowbrow beauty up here.Maria Verain Kingston turned me on to this company that does very clean mineral-based sunscreens, which are key to not having the creepy stuff in it. But what’s cool about this sunscreen is it has a slight tint, but it’s not like putting a color on top of you. It’s a type of concealer that has anti-redness properties to it, so this is not a tone. It doesn’t put color over you, it takes away red and it neutralizes.

It’s more than a face cream. I’m talking to you right now from a reclaimed 1901 schoolhouse, which is a sister project to Basilica Hudson, and it’s an innovation and design media hub where we have a bunch of restored classrooms that we rent out to upstate creatives. Florent is the botanical genius in our bottom-floor studio. These are probiotic and biodynamic face creams made by hand by a gorgeous alchemist. I have very fine pores, hence my not getting facials until now, and all those rich creams clog my pores. I can smother this on like really insane butter on toast. I can put so much of this cream on my face, and all it does is drink it up. I have incredible biodynamic, probiotic, alive stuff on my face, then I put the mineral sunscreen on top of it.

Mascaras are hard because they can smudge, and the weird tube-y mascaras can be disgusting. My teenage daughter got trapped in an algorithm and was told that Glossier is a good company, and then my friend in the fashion industry said, actually they are kind of good. I’m not a big makeup person, and I rely on mascara to do something for my face. I basically just do blush and mascara, and this is the only one that can actually thicken my lashes and never smudge and not be disgusting when I wash it off.

Leana Zuñiga, the Electric Feathers designer, is incredible. She has been around for 20 years. I used to wear her stuff. Did you ever see how gorgeousParker Posey’s memoiris as far as the photos and everything? It’s like a collage book memoir. It’s so beautiful. She’s wearing Electric Feathers throughout the whole thing. Parker and I are old friends and have a natural inner-circle crossover. Leana is both ritualistic and a fashion designer, so she makes really mystical-lady-wear. I wear a lot of her clothes, too, but this Full Moon belt can go over everything and anything. Because it’s a wraparound, you can have it as cinched or loose as you need it to be.

I’ve been driving solely electric for 15 years, and at the beginning, it was little Ford cars that had 80-mile ranges. We have been upgrading as a family with every new expansion of battery power, and the Rivian is the latest of my family’s many tried-and-true electric cars. We have an art center,Basilica Hudson, and we just completed a two-year historic green restoration. It’s entirely fossil-fuel-free, and our forest-green Rivian is ourBasilica Greenconstruction truck. It’s a deluxe mobile with an amazing sound system. I’ve been doing some interviews in it, and I’m like, this is a lovely background. I’m in a gorgeous color. It’s beautiful and clean, and everyone should drive electric if they can.