I am Niva.

I write about the tools and rituals that make a small apartment feel like home. Slowly, honestly, and with an aggressive bias toward leftovers.

What this is

Niva Living is one essay a week from a 480-square-foot apartment in a coastal American city. It is not a shopping blog. It is not a haul channel. It is somewhere between a long letter to a friend and a magazine column with a budget of zero. The essays are about small-apartment cooking, the small repairs that make small apartments livable, the food that gets made there, and occasionally about a tool or a piece of gear that has earned its square inch of counter space.

What I review — and how

I only write about a product after I have personally used it for at least thirty days in the actual apartment. Most of what gets written about lives here for sixty days or more before the essay goes up. I do not review on receipt and I do not review on a press kit.

Some essays are sponsored. When they are, you will see a label at the very top of the page in the brown strip, a kicker tag under the article title, and a sponsor box in the body of the essay. There are no hidden sponsorships and no "we received this for free but we promise it's still objective" footnotes buried at the bottom. If I would not recommend the product to a friend at full price with my own money, I do not write a sponsored review of it. Several have been declined for this reason.

What I don't do

No affiliate-stuffed gift guides. No tip jar. No "10 things in my cart this week." No DMs. No Instagram. The email at the bottom of every essay is the only channel.

Who I am

I am 34, half-Norwegian on my mother's side and half-Indian on my father's. I work in adjacent fields by day. I cook for my partner and occasionally for a rotating cast of friends who keep coming back even though my dining table is a folded card table. The apartment is rented. The pan is owned outright.