Tatyana &
Scott
Byhande
ABOUT
Two people. Two countries of origin. Decades of travel, making, tasting, and noticing details. One shared belief that life, lived fully on-location, is always more interesting compared to what it looks like from a distance.
"There is a particular quality of light that appears in the late afternoon on certain days in certain cities… in Kyiv in early October, in Bruges on a November morning, in Oaxaca just before the rainy season ends. We have spent a great deal of our lives trying to be in the right place for that light."
yhande grew out of that instinct, to show up, pay attention, and bring something back worth sharing.
B
We strive for something closer to what happens when two people who have spent decades developing aesthetic sensibilities, curiosity, and craft decide that what they've found is genuinely worth passing on.
We came to this from different directions, which is, we think, the most important thing. Tatyana arrived with the precision of a maker, someone who has always understood that how a thing is made is inseparable from what it means.
Scott arrived with the restlessness of someone who has never quite been able to stop looking, who has spent years in enough different places to understand that every place has an invisible architecture that becomes visible once you learn how to read it.
The world Byhande moves through is built from the intersection of those two sensibilities. The food that carries a history. The design that has a reason. The travel that changes what you notice when you come home.
Tatyana
Kyiv, Ukraine
I was born and raised in Kyiv, in a home where the kitchen was taken seriously and beauty was understood as a form of respect, not an indulgence, but an obligation to the people around you. That sensibility has never left me.
I trained in fashion and design, developing an eye for the proportions and details that separate something well-made from something merely functional. The culinary arts followed as a natural extension, asking similar questions, just with different ingredients. Both disciplines reward the same quality: the willingness to look closely and care deeply about the result.
With my husband, I raised a son and a daughter who grew up knowing where their food came from and why that mattered, who can walk into a room and feel immediately whether it has been thought about and if it exudes the generosity of one’s soul. I will tell you, without hesitation, that this was the most significant creative and fulfilling work of my life.
Fashion & Design
Culinary Arts
Maker
Scott
I am an American, with a career that carried me through international business and a grounding in technology. I have always been drawn to the cross-section of art and technology, which is to say: I’ve always been interested in both the beautiful thing and the process that produces it.
Years living in Belgium and traveling across Europe broadened all of it, long enough to understand what it means to inhabit a place that takes its time. Long enough to know the particular weight of a grey Flemish afternoon, the specific character of a centuries-old stone room, the way a city that has been lived in for a thousand years teaches me to stop hurrying. I’ve been traveling for as long as I can remember, across continents and cultures, always with the same underlying question: what does this place know that I don't?
I look for the structure behind the surface: the technology in the craft, the history in the street, the story behind the story.
American by way of Europe
Art & Design
Maker
Byhande is, at its core, what happened when our two ways of moving through the world began moving together. Tatyana’s precision for making things well and the globally-minded instinct to keep looking, these turned out to be the same thing, pointed in the same direction.
We travel to enrich life’s experience, which means we stay longer than we planned, eat at the table that may take some effort to find, and come home with things… a recipe, an art piece, a phrase overheard in a market, and new friendships. Experiences that change how we see things. We look at art that doesn't explain itself. We stay in places that feel genuinely like somewhere. We write about design because we believe that how a thing is made is never separate from where it came from or what it's for.
We write in the plural “we” because that is simply the truth of it. Byhande is not Tatyana's voice or Scott's voice, it is what exists in the conversation between us. The tension between the maker's precision and the explorer's restlessness. Between our mountain location in Colorado and the stone streets of Europe. Between staying and going, and knowing that both are necessary.
Everything on Byhande, every guide, every recipe, every cultural portrait, comes from something inspired by what we have seen, eaten, made, or sat with long enough to believe it may be of interest to others.
WHAT BYHANDE COVERS
Destination guides built from places we have stayed long enough to gain some kind of portrait.
TRAVEL
Architecture, interiors, objects, and the makers behind them. Beauty and design that have earned their place in our hearts.
DESIGN
Recipes that carry the memory of where they came from, and the people from whom we’ve learned.
FOOD
CULTURE
Music, ritual, language, ceremony, history, the invisible architecture of a place, made visible.
Living artists, overlooked galleries, work that stopped us. Always with the impression why it matters.
ART
CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY
The tools that enable a creative life. Occasionally shared when there is interest.