Creating Beauty and Luxury in Everyday Moments | Live Life Luxe

Welcome! I’m Dani Fontanesi, the founder of this blog, and soon-to-be lifestyle magazine, Live Life Luxe!

Writing, creating, photographing, and curating beauty have always been my passion, and I am finally ready to share my passion with the world. Over the past 10 years, I learned a lot about myself as I navigated some of the hardest moments of my life. I learned to find joy and beauty in the most unsuspecting places and to create appreciation and gratitude no matter my circumstances. More than anything, I learned that life is full of so much richness and beauty that often go overlooked. My goal with this blog (and soon-to-be magazine) is to curate all that beauty and luxury in those everyday moments and share it with the world. 

So what led me to finally launch this blog (and soon-to-be magazine)? The short answer is that writing, creating, photographing, and curating beauty have always been my passion, but my low self esteem led me to get a law degree to prove to the world that I was smart. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. I’m still just as insecure as I ever was — I just manage it better.)

After earning my degree, I went on to get a job at a fancy law firm before moving on to a coveted in-house counsel role, all while fending off crippling panic attacks from fear that I would soon be ousted as the fraudster I was.  It turns out there was no amount of external validation that could convince me that I was who I pretended to be — smart, successful, savvy, fashionable, and confident. So instead I just played that person on TV (or at least in my everyday life) and waited for it all to come crumbling down . . .  and then it did.

In 2015, I had a seemingly perfect life (aside from the panic attacks and the aforementioned fraud syndrome). I was living in New Zealand, working as a high powered attorney, waking up to a million dollar view of the Wellington harbo(u)r everyday, and walking along the waterfront to my office (also with an ocean view).

I had also just married the love of my life on a little island covered in vineyards and pure magic! We spent a week celebrating with friends and family before wrapping up the wedding festivities and soaking it all in.

I was finally living the life I always dreamed of. It felt like everything was falling into place. After our dreamy wedding week, Matt and I set off on a 3-week honeymoon across the U.S., full of excitement and adventure! We had a jammed packed itinerary starting in the Pacific Northwest and spanning both the east and west coasts before heading back to New Zealand.

But, we never made it past our first stop.

Matt got sick with a series of fevers, and three days into our honeymoon, he was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer — acute myeloid leukemia.

Our whole world stopped.

We spent several weeks in ICU before being transferred by life flight to a major cancer center in California where he underwent a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

We spent the next year following the transplant living in hospitals and in isolation fighting for his life. We lost everything we owned in the process — our house, our car, our jobs, and all our belongings except the three weeks worth of clothes we packed for a honeymoon. We were trapped 7,000 miles from our home in New Zealand with no idea when or if we would be able to return.

I learned a lot about myself and about life in the years that followed.

First, I learned that all the luxuries I had spent so many years chasing were suddenly meaningless as I laid on the cold hospital floor watching my husband fight for his life night after night. 

Most importantly, I learned how precious life is, and how the luxury of stepping outside the hospital to breathe fresh air cannot be measured by any amount of money. I learned to find joy and beauty in places I had never before seen joy or beauty. I learned to create appreciation and gratitude in the darkest moments of my life. I learned the value of love and the power of hope — and those two things pulled us through what should have been the end of our love story by all medical accounts.

More than anything though, I learned that I had wasted so much time and forfeited so much of my own happiness failing to see all the luxuries that surrounded me every day. Today I’m blessed to have a healthy, cancer-free husband, and a miracle baby who’s now five years old!

We defied so many odds to be here, and I’m so grateful for the second chance that we’ve been given at life and love.

My goal with this blog (and with the soon to be magazine) is to curate luxury in all its forms — to showcase the beauty, luxuries, and privilege that we often take for granted — and to inspire others to live a beautiful, rich, and luxurious life in its most authentic form.