À Table: A Cozy, Festive Fall Dinner With Alice Moireau

’Tis the season for holiday entertaining, and we’ve enlisted the help of the most stylish hosts we know to serve up their party tricks for a holiday hosting mini-series. Dress code festive, RSVP requested. À Table!

For Alice Moireau, setting the table starts with a color. “I love to play with palettes more than actual themes—I find it amusing to mix patterns or textures and colors rather than a cliché set-up with the usual icons,” explains the co-founder of French tableware brand Table of her approach to holiday decorating.

Accordingly, you will find no glittering tinsel on her holiday table; no shiny gold foil and certainly no red-and-green motifs. For a festive dinner party at the very tail end of fall, Moireau leaned into the hues of the season: rich burgundy blooms hand-picked from her garden and branches of crimson leaves, earthy taupe table linens balanced by delicate white layers, and simple, cream-colored stoneware that lets the menu shine. There’s a hint of playfulness (spot the mushroom figurines) and lived-in charm (nearly all of her most-loved entertaining pieces are vintage finds) to round out the meal—which, in this case, was an intimate invite for her closest friends and family to her countryside home in Olivet, a couple hours outside of her native Paris. A typical dinner at her house? “It always ends up with long meals, deep conversations, and laughs around a large wood table,” she says.

Ahead, go behind the scenes of Moireau’s holiday dinner party—and shop some similar pieces to recreate her style at home. No decorative fungi required.

Set the Scene

“I always have flowers on my tables—they bring life to the party! This time, I picked flowers from my garden that matched the table’s color palette: warm tones like deep purple, brown, and orange. My special touch are these little pieces of deco: small handmade golden wooden suns, stars, and pompoms I place for each guest as an amulet.”

The Hosting Outfit

“I love wearing colorful outfits that somehow match the table I’m setting; it’s been my thing since I was a kid. It feels even more festive and poetic to me this way, mixing patterns, colors, and textures. My favorite brands are Thinking Mu, SuperYaya if I want to go bold, Le Monde Beryl for shoes, and I always add on some fun accessories from Merrma Earth.”