Hosting a House Party
good host manifesto
Two days ago1, I moved out of 198 Westcourt Pl, the townhouse I lived in for the bulk of my undergrad. This place was a real home, which is hard to come by in the transient world of student housing. There are many things I had in this home I will probably never have again. For one thing, I was always living with at least a few of my closest friends which meant we could coordinate stupid stunts on a whim. Also, living with six people provides you a lot of opportunities for growth and expands your tolerance for that omnipresent beast called “the way other people do things”.
Now that I’m getting ready to move into my first proper adult apartment, I have to say goodbye to the easy, messy, low-stakes affair of student living. And maybe the worst thing that I’ll be saying goodbye to (for the next decade, if not for life) is hosting big house parties.
My roommates and I got really, stupidly good at hosting house parties. Specifically, the kind of house party where there’s a lot of people in attendance, loud music, alcohol out on a table, and maybe a fun theme. I’m still learning to host the more adult “dinner party” which will probably be the predominant party of my mid-twenties, but the basic hosting principals apply to those kinds of parties as well.
I know a lot of people dislike “college house parties” as a whole, but I think this has more to do with the fact that the average house party is poorly hosted than it does with any inherent aspect of a house party. House parties don’t have to feel like they’re hosted by a fraternity, it’s just about using your limited resources to create a space where lots of people can have fun. There aren’t many other spaces which are free and exist for the purposes of just having fun.
Earlier this year it was news that nobody is going to parties anymore, which provides anyone who would be interested in hosting parties with a good in: the bar is simply so low. So you can probably just host a party without reading any of what I have to say about how it ought to be done and still have a night worth your while. Hosting an occasional mediocre party is better than hosting no parties, and everyone should do their part by hosting an occasional party. But if you feel the calling to go above and beyond, you need to put in some more effort. This effort should come naturally: at the core of being a good host is a drive for excellence that lets you delight in helping other people have a good time.
Hosting a house party is like dancing ballet: you can put a lot of worthy effort into crafting a meticulously effortless vibe.
Basic sensory considerations
The most egregious sin a host can commit is to simply ignore the sensory elements of a party. Unless given thoughtful care, a party held in student housing is probably going to feel overly noisy, poorly lit, and awkwardly assembled. If part is wrong, guests will feel it immediately.
I am not going to give a long-winded lecture on how to design a space, because there are lots of people who are much more qualified than me on interior design online, so I’ll focus on low-hanging fruit and things which I think are specific to parties.
You almost certainly need more lamps. Nine feels like a good starting number of light sources to have in a large living room. Remember you are illuminating surfaces, not empty air. Unless you are trying to achieve a very specific kind of basement-rave or blind-dinner vibe, the party should probably have more light than you assume it needs. There is a world of difference between “warm, fun ambiance” and “my living room but with the overhead light turned off”.
You should clean. There are a lot of obvious vibe-based reasons for this (nobody wants to feel crumbs underfoot), but I think the most important reason to clean is selfish signalling. A clean space tells guests that they need to clean up after their own spills.
Anticipate the house getting very hot and noisy. If your house already runs warm, try to keep get it as cold as possible before people start showing up. People emit heat, especially if they are dancing or drinking. Heat begets sweat begets stink. Noise, while less offensive than stink, is harder to prepare against than heat. If you have a good ear for acoustics, try to push people towards the spaces where sound carries less.
Making room
Once you have the basic “space does not feel offensive” down, you can start thinking about functionality.
You should think about how traffic patterns are influenced by the layout of the space, and look for easy changes you can make to create patterns more conducive to making people feel at ease. People will naturally want to get food, water, and alcohol, and will not remember to move out of the way once they have acquired these things. Do people hang out in the kitchen in a way that blocks other people from getting water? Maybe put a couple of pitchers of water in the living room. Do people hang out in the kitchen because it’s the only space that’s brightly lit? Maybe clean up a bedroom beforehand for people who want full lighting to hang out in. Sober-er people and conversationalists tend to like brighter lights and lower volume, and they will be happy if you provide them a space like this, especially one where they can sit comfortably on the floor in small groups. Drunker people and dancers tend to like louder music and lower lights.
Speaker placement is especially important. Assuming the music is loud, people will probably not want to hang out right in front of the speaker, so you can place the speaker in a place where you don’t want people to congregate. (Equivalently, you can predict whether or not people think the music is too loud by how much they are avoiding the speaker).
If you are regularly overseeing a bunch of young people drinking alcohol, you will inevitably have to deal with someone getting too drunk and needing to vomit at some point or another. I don’t like the idea of someone who is very drunk locking themselves in my bathroom, so I usually designate a “drunk person bathroom” which is out of the way of the more accessible guest bathroom. I put a “do not enter unless the door is open” sign on the door and then I let the drunk camp out there, periodically checking up on them to make sure they’re okay.
Food and drink
“BYOB” is ridiculous. If you’re not interested in sharing “Y(O)B”, go drink alone in your own house. I always tell people snacks and drinks are “appreciated but not expected”, which means I can expect ~95% of people will bring a snack or a drink. When someone enters with a bottle of alcohol, I assume they brought it to share, and say something along the lines of “Thanks so much for bringing a bottle of X! [Insert positive comment about what they brought] You can put it on the table over there. Can I make you a drink?” If you get into a good rhythm of hosting parties, you will always have leftover alcohol on hand, and supplement this with a couple more bottles of spirits as needed. Seeing as alcohol doesn’t go bad, you should probably just overbuy.
I used to prepare a lot of snacks beforehand but found that this wasn’t actually that good a strategy. You only really need snacks to entertain the first five or so guests, because after that people will bring more snacks, and the snacks which cost you valuable prep time will be redundant. Dips are a good idea because they are easy and incentivize chip-eating (and people will bring lots of chips). (My dream guest brings two or three versatile mixers or a chip-dip.)
Nothing beats the appreciation gained from ordering a pizza five hours into the party. You would think you just saved the city from a dark force. It’s probably less expensive than you think to buy pizza for thirty people, especially if there are other snacks they’ve filled up on. To get concrete, I think me and my roommates typically spent ~$80 on pizza and probably a little less than that on liquor. If that’s too steep for you, there will probably be lots of people offering to chip in a few bucks for pizza.
The key to nailing food and drink is cultivating an abundance mindset. If people know that everyone will be bringing nice things to the party, they will want to participate in this. I have been to parties where people are asking each other for booze because the only thing which is properly communal is a single bottle of coke and some ketchup chips, which makes one feel like a scavenging animal.
Music and dance
Selecting music for a party is all about submitting yourself to the will of the people. You can eventually guide the will of the people, but this never works if you don’t first understand what people want, which requires submitting yourself.
Nobody wants to listen to your favourite music. People don’t even want to hear their own favourite music (except in some grandiose delusion where their special music gets played at a party and everyone finally turns and acknowledges what a stunning individual they are). People want music that creates a fun environment.
You need to develop a sense of the party-geist, the living spirit of the party. There will be natural ebbs and flows in energy, and music can help move the party-geist, but only so far as the party-geist is willing to be moved.
Sometimes when you are on aux, you will get repeated requests from someone who has no sense of the party-geist. It is within your rights to politely refuse these people. You can also provide an alternative song, maybe by the same artist, which would be more successful. In a few cases, I have told someone that if they want me to play a song, they need to change the vibe of the party from the bottom-up, or they need to promise to get everyone off their feet once the song starts playing even if it means making a fool of themselves. This actually works surprisingly well.
Dance is one of the many things you can do with music. Dancing is great! But it’s not done enough because nobody wants to be any of the first few people dancing.
I have recently started using a dance timer. At some point early on in the night, I put a timer on screen giving people fair warning before they “have” to dance. In the time leading up to it, I’ll say things like “looks like the dance timer is going to go off soon! Maybe we should dance a little now so it feels less awkward when it goes off!” And when the dance timer does go off, I get everyone to dance for ten minutes. I only play music which everyone can definitely dance to like YMCA or The Macarena or something, and then I put something on the screen that says “Thank you all for dancing! You are allowed to stop now if you would like!” Giving everyone an excuse to do easy-mode dancing for ten minutes really helps people feel comfortable dancing the rest of the night.
So much about hosting is about building momentum towards a certain energy. You can rely on your guests to keep it going.
Going mommy mode
Last year I realized that when I host a party I almost always enjoy the party a lot less than my average guest. After reflecting on the disconnect between how much I thought I ought to enjoy my own parties and how much I actually did, I came up with “mommy mode”.
“Going mommy mode” is taking on responsibilities so that other people can enjoy themselves. It is nursing the sick or talking to the person that nobody else wants to talk to. It's vigilantly defending “the vibe” even when things are going very well. It’s making sure nobody gets too drunk. It’s confronting someone if they’re acting in a way which makes other people feel uncomfortable. It’s alleviating guests of the burden to deal with things which might get in the way of them having a good time.
Going mommy mode can be rewarding, but you have to recognize that it provides a different kind of enjoyment than being a guest in order to enjoy it. It’s also somewhat necessary: if you go into every party you host with the sole goal of being the thrilling life of the party, you will probably host dull parties as nobody feels comfortable enough in your home to let loose. Someone needs to be thinking with a little more distance from the immediate now, and if you’re the host that someone should probably be you.
Acknowledging the role of party mommy makes being the party mommy much nicer. I now expect that at some point during the night I will have to be in a situation I don’t want to, and I take it on the chin as a sacrifice I’m making for the collective. If you can host with other people, you can share the load of being the party mommy, which means you can probably offload all your least favourite parts of hosting onto someone who doesn’t mind them, and do the same for someone else.
Starting and iterating
Most of the things I’ve picked up about hosting parties came from conversation with my roommates. Having a group of willing accomplices is a necessary precondition to pull any of this off, especially as a student in Waterloo where every four months you need to re-evaluate whether or not you actually know anyone in the city right now.
We would often discuss small design changes before the party happened and come up with a back-up plan in case a new layout didn’t work. We were only able to get good at this because we were hosting parties very often in the same space.
If you want to host parties I would recommend finding a group to host them with where each of you naturally manages different things. Ideally this group would be your roommates, and you would all live in a good space for parties. In my situation, this factor alone was worth choosing to live with more roommates. If you’re not in that ideal situation, just choose whoever has the least-shitty living space and get started. You will get better at it as you go! I have hosted a couple terrible parties (none pictured here), but at least I will never host a party which is terrible for the same reason twice.
It will also get a lot easier as you go because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Once you work up the courage to ask fifty acquaintances to show up to your house for the first time, you can just repeatedly invite the same people. If you’re worried you don’t know enough people, just ask people to bring their friends. Invite everyone. Invite nice people you meet on the bus or at the convenience store.
Doing it at all is worthwhile, even if you’re doing it under lots of constraints with whatever energy you have. People have told me they met their entire current friend group or their significant other at a party I hosted. So a good party can actually change someone’s life for the better.
If you’re not sold on all the effort it takes to host a good party, commit to hosting a mid one. I would still appreciate it if you hosted a mediocre party with bad lighting and no booze, so long I’m invited.
appendix
Timing guest arrival (including advanced maneuvers)
Try as you might for health reasons, nothing beats staying up late for a party. While you could host a “darty” (day party), this is its own affair with separate considerations (i.e. do you own a barbecue? cornhole? funny apron?). I like parties that start around eight.
Thinking a lot about arrival timing is an advanced maneuver. You don’t need to get into the level of minutia I’m about to discuss. You can just tell people “eight” and let the cards fall where they may.
The arrival patterns of guests are of interest to me. I usually plan more specifics for the first hour of the party, where there’s only six or so guests, more than I do for the peak of the party where there might be thirty. It’s easy to keep up a good energy once it’s been set. So I do what I can to try to control who will arrive first.
I have done no surveying, but I think people are of a few minds when deciding when to show up to a party. A select few will show up whatever time you tell them. Most people will aim to show up an hour or two after you tell them, figuring this will save them from the potentially awkward situation of being the first guest who has to hang out with the host alone. Another large contingent will show up to the party whenever they have finished getting ready for it, with no real goal in mind. Some people have a couple different parties they might want to go to, and are figuring out how they can make an appearance to both. Some people will come by around two in the morning if they can make it at all. You can get ahead of this by telling different people to show up at different times. You can ask people who you feel like you need to catch up with to come earlier than everyone else. (You should probably let them know this is what you are doing.) If you think someone falls into one of the “purposefully comes late” categories, you can tell them the party starts at, say, seven but you don’t expect many people to get there until eight or nine.
I have a good intuition for “people things”, so I can do this kind of planning without a lot of conscious thought. I’m not sure whether or not it would be worthwhile if I had to sit down and think about any of this.
as of writing this post, not of posting it
someone accidentally invited the bed bugs to your last party
fond memories 🫶 love and miss you