David Monn: Art of Celebrating

Imagine seeing the world through event planner David Monn’s eyes for just one minute of your life. Imagine walking into a room and knowing instantly how to make it better. Imagine if you could take a few handfuls of supermarket plums and grapes and turn them into a centerpiece as impressive as baskets of roses. Imagine going someplace you’ve been a hundred times and seeing new ideas and new inspiration, as if you’d never been there before.
For twelve years, David Monn’s magical way of seeing the world has been available only to a privileged group of clients through his event-planning firm in New York City. A state dinner at the White House, openings of the Tiffany flagship store and the Fontainebleau Hotel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala, countless large-scale birthdays and weddings and other celebrations—every lucky guest knows that there is no party like a Monn party. Building on one telling detail of a client’s life—for a bride, it might be a favorite candy; for Frank Gehry, it might be cardboard—Monn creates a few unforgettable, carefully choreographed hours using scent, sound, sight, touch, and taste to create what he calls “one simple truth.” It has to be “shared, lived, and felt” by everyone there.
But creating beauty in your life does not require 10,000 balloons or 3,000 hydrangeas. Monn has surprisingly simple lessons to share. As he likes to say, it starts with “not just looking at, but really seeing” the world around you. It involves understanding the importance, in everything you do, of his three favorite words: authenticity, scale, and detail. It means considering your home as not just rooms, but instead as “a living environment,” and not thinking of a birthday as a party, but rather “a milestone of accomplishment and growth.” You must genuinely believe, as he does, that “truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.”