Behind the Scenes: The 2025 Spring Issue

How we got scooped (twice), how to get in our new fashion feature (you probably can't), and the (charming) truth about Darien Rozell's house.

An outtake from our cover shoot with Pantry Hill’s Darien Rozell

Darien Rozell, the creative force behind the @PantryHill Instagram account and Saratoga Living’s Spring 2025 cover subject, has been on my radar for a while. In recent years, I’ve interviewed her for an After Hours article about microtrends (though there’s certainly nothing micro about what’s happening at Pantry Hill), and featured pictures of her great-great-grandmother, who helped inspire Darien’s current way of life, in the print magazine. Her quaint photos and heartwarming videos always come up on my Instagram feed, and I finally got to meet her in person at last year’s Mom Prom, to which she wore her actual high school prom dress.

But it was a video of Darien talking about her new barn, a 2,000-square-foot timber frame structure that will serve as the Pantry Hill brand’s HQ, that really got my attention. I reached out to her hoping to write a story about the barn itself, and learned that it was only a piece of Darien’s master plan to take her lifestyle brand to the next level in 2025. Two trips to Pantry Hill and a whole lot of tea (actual and proverbial) later, our cover story came together. Read on to find out if Darien’s house really looks the way it does on Instagram, how we photographed Chowderfest’s most fashion-forward participants, and more insider intel on how the 2025 Design Issue came to be.