Studio to Farm Stand

from Ojai Magazine. Summer 2022

by Ojai Magazine

A Cut Above the Rest

FROM Studio TO Stand

architecture to honor produce bins

by KAREN LINDELL

**Clayton England with his fresh-look stackable farm stands.**
Photo: DAVID LANDSEL

Josie’s Gridley trail honor bar is open for business in Ojai, and the merchandise is a bargain: 25 cents each, or $1 for five, to purchase pixie tangerines, navel oranges, lemons, grapefruit, or avocados. “or take it if you need it,” a sign says.

The fruit is available at a simple but elegantly designed farm stand along Ojai’s Gridley Trail. The handmade vertical wood structure, about the size of a tall bookshelf, houses three black wire baskets filled with produce. Customers, based on the honor system, drop payment into a locked box at the bottom. The farm stand’s daily total? About $5 to $10, mainly in quarters. Architect Sonny Ward and his daughter, Josie, built this honor-system farm stand on his property, the Hermitage Ranch, north of the Gridley trailhead. Hikers and neighbors stop at the stand to sample citrus and avocados grown on the working ranch he shares with his husband, Michael Lombardo, and children Josie and Johnny. “I love seeing bits of orange peel scattered on the ground,” Ward said. Informal farm stands like this one — and not at all like this one, because each has a distinct, homemade look — can be spotted throughout Ojai. Popular in rural areas around the U.S., they are a win-win for everyone: farmers or homeowners who want to share or sell the abundant harvest from their farms, gardens, or orchards, and customers in search of home-grown fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, herbs, and plants. Unlike larger roadside stands that peddle local produce, these primitive farm stands aren’t on the main roads around town. They don’t have a cash register or employees. They are built by hand, or might even just be a wheelbarrow with cardboard signage. Honor farm stands are examples of “vernacular” architecture, loosely defined as everyday or ordinary structures (not necessarily buildings) created with a specific region and local materials in mind. Ward, founder and owner of June Street Architecture in West Hollywood, calls these sorts of farm stands “anti-architecture.” “For me, the architecture is not about the thing you build,” he said. “It’s very much about the experience of making them, and the communication and engagement with community.” Recently, Ward’s farm stand and others around Ojai became teaching tools. In 2021, students at Woodbury University’s architecture school in Burbank designed and built roadside farm stands tailored for Ojai. Ward, who has a bachelor’s degree from and later taught at Woodbury, worked with one of his former teachers there, Jeanine Centuori, to develop the course as part of the school’s multidisciplinary Agency for Civic Engagement (ACE) program. Teams of ACE students combine their skills to create real-world projects funded by grants that serve the public good. Centuori, also the co-founder, with her artist husband, of UrbanRock Design in Los Angeles, said the design-build studio class is unique for an architecture school.

“Normally for a studio project, students design something big on computers, like a museum or an airport,” she said. “This is the complete opposite. They’re designing and actually building something in a single semester, so it has to be small-scale. These are nitty-gritty, real-world projects about trying to effect change at a grassroots level.” Other ACE projects have included an interactive self-guided tour of Watts in South Los Angeles, an outdoor classroom at a middle school in Burbank, and an ADA accessible wooden deck at a therapeutic horse-riding club. Ward said he and his husband “weren’t looking to be growers” when they bought their ranch in Ojai in 2016. But the property has 50 acres of avocado and citrus trees, and he has happily become a member of Ojai’s agricultural community.

Ward, who has brainstormed with Centuori about other ACE projects, wanted to come up with a possible idea for Ojai that fit ACE’s mission. He and Centuori spent time driving around Meiners Oaks and the east end of Ojai, looking for vernacular structures. They decided small-town fruit stands could be an interesting design project for ACE students that might also help the Ojai community. Farm stands “are really a cultural object,” Centuori said. “They’re very ad hoc — some cute, some crude — and put together by non-designers. We were interested in what design students could add.” “I love the studio of the everyday — glorifying everyday objects,” Ward said. “Someone put all this love in this object that honors these local communities. We teach students to admire and honor whatever the culture and values are of the community.” Four teams of students in the class, when coming up with initial designs, were overly ambitious and made their structures too “cumbersome and complicated,” Centuori said. Ward was more blunt: “They were Transformeresque,” he said. “They opened up in 10 different ways. They were top heavy, with lots of places for little kids to get their fingers caught, and Rube Goldberg-ish, with cables and complicated ways to make them work.” Centuori challenged the students by asking, “Why do you need all of that? Put yourself in the mindset of growers.” A field trip to Ojai transformed the students’ understanding of what might make the most functional stand. They visited Ward’s ranch and learned about the history of Ojai from local farmers and farmhands, then toured the town and observed farm stands to notice traits such as angled shelves, to get a better view of the produce, and fewer moving parts, to prevent injuries. Of the four projects, only one, created by students Clayton England and Garo Klian, truly ended up executing Ward and Centuori’s vision of a simple farm stand. England and Klian built four A-frame stackable stands with angled shelves for displaying produce. They are labeled with the words “Ojai,” “Eats,” “Farm,” and “Fresh,” capable of creating a full sentence when all together, or functioning as separate words on their own. Each has a money box and chalkboard surfaces for writing. Visiting Ojai was incredibly valuable, England said, and helped the students realize “our ideas had to be a lot simpler.” He also got a strong sense of Ojai’s visual aesthetic. He and Klian wanted to create a mobile stand that could be easily manipulated and also thought carefully about the color palette, choosing citrus hues for background colors and lavender lettering influenced by items grown in Ojai. Their A-frame stands stayed in Ojai, and actually went on sale at Wachter’s Hay & Grain, with proceeds going to the students. Ward and Centuori were also impressed with a stand created by students Nicholas Haddad, June Lee, and Minn Maung that was less functional but aesthetically beautiful. Haddad, who plans to make high-end furniture after he graduates, had never seen farm stands like the ones in Ojai. “I was used to seeing hot dog carts, ice cream stands, or those carts where people take watermelon and other fruit and put Tajín on it, but that’s about all the knowledge I had,” he said. Although the assignment was to design a roadside stand, he and his team “weren’t interested in something as typical as a standard produce cart,” Haddad said.

Clayton England and Garo Klian in their studio design class at Woodbury University.

Photo: Clayton England

“We wanted something bold that would intricately redefi ne one.” Their stand features panels made from cedar using a Japanese technique called shou sugi ban. The procedure, which scorches the planks, protects the cedar from sun, water, bugs, and mold. Centuori said the cedar stand “had some nice features, but it was a little too delicate with too many moving parts, a Pandora’s box with things sliding and tilting, which made it challenging from a functional perspective.” Although the stand is too heavy to take to Ojai, Haddad’s team is proud that it will still be put to good use at Woodbury University, displayed and used for distributing campus-grown avocados and other produce to students. England plans to graduate in May and start work at a large architecture fi rm. Although he’s more likely to end up designing buildings, libraries, and religious spaces than roadside stands, England said the project taught him the importance of visiting the community where an architecture project will be built. Meanwhile, look out for a yellow, orange, or green farm stand somewhere along the side of the road that says “Ojai,” “Eats,” “Farm,” or “Fresh.”