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The Riv Founder & Editor

Les Firestein les@montecitojournal.net

Managing Editor Zachary Bernstein zbernstein@montecitojournal.net

Art Director Trent Watanabe trent@montecitojournal.net

Staff Writer Jeff Wing

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Photography Kim Reierson

Contributors

Heidi Clements, Joe Donnelly, Jonas Oppenheim, Bill Robens, Jeff Shelton, Beatrice Tolan

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Our Contributors

No doubt, Jeff Shelton’s buildings stand out from their neighbors. We asked our contributors: “What’s your favorite wild piece of architecture?”

Heidi Clements is a social media creator and has written for The Riv: “As someone born and raised in New York, the architecture of the city is part of my DNA and the Chrysler Building is a standout. Its Art Deco design is fun and unique and stands out in a crowd—which is how I like to think of myself. Ha!”

Bill Robens is a professional writer and aspiring bon vivant with several publications to his credit: “The Citadel Outlets—formerly U.S. Tires building—in Commerce. Growing up, it was this enormous abandoned Assyrian palace with broken windows off the 5. Madness.”

Jeff Wing has overwritten for contech, higher ed, and the greater good. His weekly column appears in the Montecito Journal: “In the early ‘70s, my family lived in the Wonderland Hills district of Boulder, Colorado, near the Brenton House—a habitable mushroom cluster made of polyurethane foam sprayed over reinforced steel. It’s briefly featured in Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy Sleeper.”

Jonas Oppenheim writes for stage, screen, print, and corporate roasts: “As a high schooler in Santa Monica, my art class assignment was to make an architectural model. I thought Frank Gehry’s Binoculars Building in Venice would be a fun challenge, but I did a terrible job. Also in that art class: Frank Gehry’s son. He and I never spoke again.”

Beatrice Tolan is a writer for both The Riv and Montecito Journal Weekly Newspaper: “One of my favorite architectural pieces is the Setas de Sevilla, FKA Metropol Parasol. It’s a massive honeycomb structure in Seville, Spain. It brings me back to my bee brethren.”

Joe Donnelly is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author. He teaches at Whittier College: “The Theme Building at LAX, a Googie landmark from 1961, kitschy and optimistic and welcoming, even now.”

BOUNDLESS LIVING ARCHITECTURE LANDSCAPE INTERIORS

Editor's Letter: Strictly Ballroom

Normally in this space I preview the contents of our magazine and the great articles you’ve come to expect. But as we go to press there’s a national design story sucking up all the media oxygen which demands our attention. South Park may be obsessed with Trump’s anatomy, but the design world is obsessed with his balls—the balls that will presumably be held in a White House doppelganger of Trump’s 650-seat ballroom at Mar-A-Lago.

Edifice Complex

For the left, the kerfuffle over the planned White House ballroom stokes a narrative about a supposed wannabe dictator feeding an insatiable desire for monumentalism and perhaps building a Colossus of DOGE (remember Mr. Trump’s Mt. Rushmore controversy?). On the other hand if you’re a Trump supporter these design flexes feed a narrative of returning America to its original colonial grandeur. Frankly, it was easier to have grandeur pre-Civil War when the labor force was ostensibly free.

I find it fascinating folks are so proprietary about White House design—a structure built by enslaved people for an uneducated slaveowner, a man who was less educated than many of his peers, and whose only trip outside the colonies was a brief trip to Barbados—another British colony. It begs the question: is the White House supposed to grow and evolve, or is it supposed to be stuck in time? And if so, which time?

The People Had No Say in the “People’s House”

The original design competition for the White House had nine submitted plans (including one by Jefferson, anonymously). And then Washington, who’d barely completed eighth grade and had no real design chops, picked the winner. Washington selected a design by James Hoban, another slaveowner, who designed banks and courthouses—some here and many in Ireland. So the process was not democratic. There was no juried competition (even though design competitions have been around for 2,500 years) and no open forum or public comment. Just an uneducated tobacco farmer who said, “I like this one.” Selecting the White House design was not much more sophisticated than eenie-meanie-miney-moe. I’ve actually been following Trump’s design predilections for decades. Indeed the first thing I was ever commissioned to write was a story about Donald and Ivana’s plans to refresh The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, which they had just purchased. (And both of which, Donald and The Plaza, would go on to star in Home Alone 2.)

In researching that story I spent the day with the Trumps. In fact, somewhere in my catacombs I have an autographed copy of The Art of the Deal “To Les Firestein—a great writer. –DJT.” Although never-Trumpers will say this is just another Trump lie. Whatever.

Here’s a footnote of history I’ll bet you weren’t aware of. Did you know that long before he entered politics, Trump approached the Obama administration with an offer to build the White House a (then) $100 million ballroom—at his own expense? In 2010 Trump approached Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod with the offer to build the ballroom—an offer at first denied by Axelrod, but later confirmed by Obama’s former communications director Josh Earnest. Inside the White House Trump’s offer was widely derided. Then a year later Obama himself mocked what a Trump refresh of the White House would look like at the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner. Roger Stone says that public humiliation was the direct cause of Trump running for president. But that’s another story for another day.

It’s curious to note that in addition to Trump, every single president has messed with the design of the White House

The proposed new ballroom for the White House.

in one way or another. And every one of those men (sadly, in 250 years it has only been men) has received massive public pushback for these remuddlings.

There is an absolutely fantastic tome about all the design changes made by all the presidents published in 2009 called Dream House: The White House as an American Home by Sam Watters and the aptly named Ulysses Grant Dietz. But of all the remuddlings that came to the People’s House, Dietz and Watters save their harshest words for… wait for it…

Jackie , Oh!

It’s interesting how much heat our current prez takes for his aesthetic when the authors of Dream House decry how the White House used to be a quintessential suburban home… up until Jackie got her cotillion-gloved hands on it. Dietz and Watters talk about how the previous presidents’ designers were “usually good and sometimes exceptional. Until the Kennedy administration, when the White House became a museum with hotel amenities.” It’s an interesting design debate: the idea of Jackie O as a possibly greater interior desecrator than President Trump who himself is frequently referred to as a wrecking ball.

Maybe desecrator isn't the right word. What the authors of Dream House maintain is that Jackie made the White House, if anything, too nice, to the point of being inaccessible to the common American. But Jackie's word for inaccessible was "aspirational." In any event, her television White House tour was watched by almost half of the United States, so it obviously resonated with... almost half of the United States (I guess we've always been a nation divided).

Baron Trump Vs. Baronial Bouvier

In Dream House, the authors talk about how the White House used to be where presidents like Eisenhower would barbecue outside and where Jackie couldn’t wait to perform an exorcism and toss Ike's Weber grill. Jackie was on record (and actually on tapes you can still buy) saying the White House looked like it had been “decorated from discount stores.” Jackie wanted to turn the White House into “the kind of elegant Park Avenue apartment she had known as a girl.” For the record, that apartment was at 740 Park Avenue, a place known as the most luxurious address in NYC where the Bouviers maintained a duplex. Uncle Tom’s Cabin it was not.

Jackie Kennedy used high-end French decorators and imported antiques to create an American royal palace featuring a simulacrum of colonial America that never actually existed and was, if anything, French. Years later the populist Trump would pave over Jackie’s rose garden and when he announced his refresh of Air Force One, he promised it would look “more American” and not feature “Jackie Kennedy colors.”

Some important dates in the revisionist history of Jackie Kennedy: In 1960 and 1961, she reimagines the White House. In 1962, she broadcasts on all three networks a tour of her White House redesign for which she wins an Emmy. Then in 1964, after JFK is assassinated, Jackie does a series of interviews with Arthur Schlesinger. Interviews which eventually become a book released by her daughter Caroline in 2011. Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy is a literary oddity you can purchase and actually hear these original conversations (it comes with a CD set if you still have a CD player). Among other revelations, she states that she actually “loathes the French.” Say it ain’t so, Jackie O! (And apparently, she identifies as Irish, long before "identifying as" anything was in vogue. Jackie always was fashion forward.)

All of this supports my theory that American politics is basically just pro wrestling writ slightly larger. It turns out that Jackie, the original It Girl of style, is in her own words a bit of a misanthrope. While Trump, considered a philistine and a brute, restored and improved the derelict Mar-A-Lago estate, an architecturally significant American manse by the first Palm Beach architect to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Jackie and Donnie it’s that our reputations can wax and wane over time, like wine. They can also go bad with time, if not actively preserved in the proper environment.

Timing is everything.

Les Firestein, Founder and Editor, The Riv

Jackie and Donald when they were more, ahem, "aligned."

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THE ART OF JOYFUL REBELLION WITH SANTA BARBARA’S ARCHITECTURAL PROVOCATEUR AND, QUITE POSSIBLY, OUR GAUDÍ

had an interesting conversation with my friend Marc Appleton who also happens to be one of my favorite architects. Marc was telling me how much he enjoys the work of local architect Jeff Shelton, which is curious for a number of reasons. Marc works mainly in the Spanish style, and his architecture is known for its clean line and restraint. Marc has also penned important tomes on the work of Southern California classicists like Wallace Neff, G. W. Smith, Gordon Kaufmann, and Paul R. Williams. Jeff Shelton’s work, on the other hand, can seem to the uninitiated like Santa Barbara style meets Andalusia meets R. Crumb meets Escher meets Dr. Seuss. The opposite

of restrained, Shelton’s architectures are exuberant, exhilarating, some would even say rambunctious. “But,” Appleton says, “Jeff is damn good. And he’s finally being taken seriously—as well he should!”

In an industry where cold minimalism and computergenerated precision are ever increasing, Jeff Shelton stands as a defiant hand-hewn reminder that architecture can still spring forth unadulterated from the human mind and hand. His buildings dance through Santa Barbara’s streets like visual jazz improvs—all curved iron, vibrant tiles, and unexpected rhythms. While some architects chase trends, Shelton has spent decades crafting a distinctly local architectural language that feels both ancient and startlingly new, drawing as much from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain as from Spanish Colonial Revival. In brief, his structures read like architectural syncopation.

IS JEFF SHELTON SANTA BARBARA’S GAUDÍ? OR THE WORLD’S?

orking from a studio that feels more like an artist’s atelier than an architect’s office, Shelton has created what hyperlocals call the “Fig District,” a collection of buildings that have become a surprising tourist attraction, drawing architectural pilgrims several times a week from all over the world. Shelton’s success stems not from chasing commissions or courting controversy, but from a steadfast commitment to craft and community.

THE SHELTON BROTHERS COLLECTIVE OR “GUILD”

eff’s brother Dave fabricates Shelton’s signature ironwork, local artisans fabricate and install Shelton-designed lamps and tiles, and the contractor, Dan Upton, has been bringing Shelton’s mind and iron-bending sketches to life for nigh on three decades. The result is architecture that looks artisanal because it is artisanal. Each structure and whimsical detail a collaboration between family, friends, and longtime Shelton disciples who’ve learned to translate his distinctive visual language into three dimensions.

In an era of architectural homogenization, Shelton’s work serves as a reminder that joy can and maybe must be an essential building material. Best of all, it’s recyclable.

Photo by Kim Reierson

FILMMAKER/ATHLETE

screenwriter and director, from 1967 through 1971 Ron Shelton was an infielder in the minor leagues, arguably developing—willingly or otherwise—the hot core of what would become his creative filmmaking oeuvre. The oldest brother of the Shelton sibs, Ron’s love of and fealty to baseball was made very public through the wild success of his best-known film Bull Durham; his very first crack at directing a movie, one he also happened to write. To say the film validated Ron’s approach doesn’t begin to express the scale of the public’s embrace of the movie, which earned an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and the eternal gratitude of baseball acolytes everywhere. A backwater niche magazine called Sports Illustrated ranked Bull Durham “the Greatest Sports Movie” of all time. Mastery takes time, and when the moment is ripe, shows up seemingly unannounced.

Following his degree at Santa Barbara’s academy in the woods, Westmont College (generational nexus of Shelton family legacy), and five years in the minor leagues honing his baseball and storytelling id, Shelton dove into his MFA in sculpture at the University of Arizona. Thereafter he beelined for art Mecca LA and fell hard into film writing and he made a splash. His other films include White Men Can’t Jump, Tin Cup, Cobb, and a score of others that define the inimitable Ron Shelton canon. He has worked with Paul Newman, Nick Nolte, Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, Harrison Ford, and a studio system whose corporatization he occasionally laments.

“My

architectural design approach is not natural for Leon, a man who came from Nebraska with the ‘form follows furnace’ design principle where the heater is located first and the architecture is designed around it.”

I asked Jeff if bigger tape balls meant a better year, but he laughed and said the opposite—smaller was better. Because smaller balls imply fewer tries. Every year he rolls up the scraps of tape from his renderings into a ball. Why? Don’t ask.

Photos by Kim Reierson

ANDALUSIAN OR AN ILLUSION?

A VISIT TO MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM

alking inside Jeff Shelton’s office is like taking a walk inside his brain, which looks like a souk in Marrakech. There’s a lot of stunning design, of course. With sketches and architectural models hanging off the walls, cascading off bookshelves and suspended from the ceiling. Jeff also saves balls of accumulated drafting tape from each year of his practice and labels them by vintage. And speaking of vintage, Jeff also has a religiosity about drinking at a certain pub, the James Joyce, on a certain day every week, and he keeps a notebook and graph of who drinks with him on which Tuesday and what the weather was. Shelton believes that pubs are an intrinsic ingredient of community. In fact, he’s written an illustrated book about it called, strangely enough, Pub Theory

LF: Your work has such a distinctive style. Where does that come from?

JS: The soul of my work is right here in town. From Montecito’s Cold Spring Creek to the ocean. It’s the chaparral down to the ocean, the fog. I grew up right below Westmont College on what was the Beatnik section of Mountain Drive. I worked with people like the architect-philosopher Frank Robinson who did some incredible, unrestrained and freestyling work. Frank’s ethos was you build with what you’ve got, with what you find on site. Back when I started, families were still building homes like birds making nests.

LF: Let’s talk about your own nest. The one you grew up in. I know you’ve got three brothers and all four of you are, for lack of a better word, fairly epic. We’ve got you, we’ve got Dave who’s like Brâncusi with a blowtorch. There’s Ron Shelton who wrote and directed, among other films, Bull Durham. And your brother Steve who’s one of the most beloved teachers this town has ever seen.

JS: That’s all because of my mom. She’s the one who made it all happen. In a nutshell, everything was encouraged. She never discouraged any idea.

LF: Tell me about growing up in Santa Barbara and how that shaped you and your work.

JS: We lived below Westmont, and my parents worked at the college. It put us in contact with a very interesting mix of people. There were definitely some John Birchers there, but on the other side we had beatniks and hippies and the peaceniks. And somehow we got along with everyone.

LF: Obviously your folks gave you all a lot of confidence. I know there’s an interesting story about how you got into the architecture program at the University of Arizona.

JS: The story is I didn’t get into the University of Arizona. I was rejected from the program but got accepted to the university as an English major.

LF: Funny, I don’t think your English is that good.

JS: What I did was I enrolled as an English major, but I went to the architecture classes anyway, did all the work and handed in all the papers. And once they realized how well I was doing, they allowed me into the architecture program. I graduated with honors.

LF: So then you worked at a normal firm for a while. And had your hand in some very substantial L.A. projects. Seems like a strange place to find a Jeff Shelton.

JS: I think it was good for me being at a big firm with big projects. I worked with Brenda Levin on the Bradbury Building, among other projects. I was exposed to a lot of great designs with Brenda. And in other offices, I was also exposed to a lot of mundane architecture… and mundane, kind of rote architectural practices. That’s ultimately what led me to hang my own shingle.

LF: Looking around this place it looks like you work almost entirely by hand. Is that deliberate? To, like, keep the guilds alive?

JS: If I can keep it that way, totally. It’s what gives my buildings their life. The visibility of the human hand, and the clear intention to be artistic and playful. I actually draw a lot of these shapes that people now call my signature directly onto the framing before the plaster guys come in. If some of my stuff looks a little… hand drawn, that’s because it is.

BELOVED TEACHER/ HUMANITIES ENTHUSIAST

t is a cinematic trope that can never hold a candle to the real thing—the beloved public school teacher whose young charges are quietly, life-changingly electrified by their teacher’s unorthodox vision. Or visions. Steve Shelton—lifelong poet, musician, singer/songwriter, and visual artist—taught public school for some 40 years with an inimitable vibe not always pedagogically aligned with standardized teacher credentialing. He recounts explaining the color wheel concept to his students:

“I suggested that we imagine this blue carpet to be part of a very long, circular path of carpet that would move through all colors. Once the carpet circle was complete, the issue of beginning and ending of said circle could be debated long past their required days of attendance—although, once we began on this journey, they seemed to forget the clock altogether.” Teaching subtlety and the experiential magic of gradation can have a stealth effect on a kid’s future perspective.

Over the years, Shelton has released a dozen albums and singles, his songs appearing in films and TV shows. He’s written thousands of words of poetry, and paints both figurative and abstract forms. Were his fortunate students aware—through the decades—that “Mr. Shelton” was a right-brain magus? They’ll realize it in their daily adult lives.

LF: You and your brother, Dave, are like twins who developed your own language. Tell me about that collab.

JS: Dave and I don’t even need to talk. He does all the ironwork. He’s the one who brought welding into the Shelton family when he was in art school in Missoula, and now everyone in our family welds. They say the Sheltons weld before they can walk. We're just a family of artists. But Dave can figure anything out, absolutely anything. He’s an incredible craftsman but he’s also a mechanical genius. For instance, if your car breaks down, he can fix your car too.

LF: You’ve created what people call the “Fig District.” What is that?

JS: I never intended to do a whole neighborhood of buildings here. I just kept getting this cluster of commissions and then after a while, someone came in and I said, “Buy it within four blocks of me if you want me to do it.” And they did. They bought a lot. Then I think that caught on. People would say, “I want to be kind of in that little thing.” Okay, great. Go find a lot. But I never tried to put eight buildings together as a tour, which is what I have now.

LF: And how did that happen?

JS: I asked myself that same question. I was wondering why I had so many visitors. Finally, one day this Chinese woman comes in with her parents and explains, “Oh, you’re number one on ‘Little Red Book for Santa Barbara.’” Apparently Little Red Book is the top tourist guide in China. (I guess it’s like our TripAdvisor.) And somehow Jeff Shelton’s Studio got listed as the #1 thing to do when you’re here. I used to get irritated when people came by the office, but I’ve loosened up.

Photo by Jim Bartsch.

LF: Your buildings seem to really connect with people, especially youth.

JS: The kids are the ones that come to me all the time. They get my aesthetic the most clearly. I think it’s what you mentioned earlier about things getting more stiff—my work stands out more because people see the human hand in it. People want that. I think people crave it. They might not say they do, they might not know they do, but they respond to it. It seems the closer people are to their childlike sense of wonder the more my work resonates.

LF: I know it’s a broad question, but what’s your take on contemporary architecture?

JS: I’ll drive by a building and think, “Oh my God, I could turn this thing into something.” They got the structure right and then just… what happened? You guys gave up on joy. You’re taught to give up on joy, by the way. Some of the schools just... beat it out of you. So many of the architecture departments are talking to themselves, or at best talking to other architects. And they forget about that person either living down the street or just walking by. How is the public experiencing your building? That should count for something. In fact, maybe it should count for everything.

“Many architects, builders, and developers have a goal only of making heated space that keeps the weather out, and that’s about it. Build it, lease it, sell it, and leave. I call it the ‘gold mine’ mentality. There are many abandoned towns across the western U.S., old mining towns that went bust in the early 20th century. Miners came in, constructed buildings, took all the gold, and left the surroundings polluted and in shambles. That is what most architecture in America is now.”

by Jim Bartsch.

Photo

IRONWORKER/COLLABORATOR

avid Shelton works with iron. His idiosyncratic accoutrements are today the collective metalloid framework that lends Santa Barbara her unique posture. This was not inevitable.

Following his undergrad at Westmont College, David Shelton did grad school at the University of Montana in Missoula, where his devotion to painting morphed—under the benevolent influence of a gang of visiting professors—into a new dedication: sculpture. Returning to his hometown of Santa Barbara with his wife and kids, David took a welding job, creative metal joinery entering his figurative bloodstream. David Shelton would have a hand in evolving the art department at Westmont, throwing his expertise and resources into the massive refurb of a near-teardown on the campus known to Westmont as Unit I. The resurrected building would ultimately house the art and music departments, respectively.

David Shelton’s readily identifiable (not to say entirely explicable) ironworks are an inseparable element of brother Jeff’s architectural expressionism. Functional, figurative, and fabulist, David’s iron creations appear malleable as clay, seamlessly lending themselves to the habitable undulations that have become Jeff’s architectural trademark. Apart from Jeff’s builds, David’s ferrous fingerprints are all over town—from the bold, iconic Corn glyphs that appear along lower Milpas, to the phantasmagorical gates that guard the hallowed Community Arts Workshop on Garden Street, sacrosanct and psychedelic crucible of the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Parade and bacchanal.

LF: Your approach to planning and design review boards seems unusually successful. How did you become a Board of Architectural Review whisperer?

JS: I just go over there and treat them well, and they treat me well. There’s no favors. They’re just helping me find the way, the part of the code that makes this work. That’s all I want. There’s a lot of review board members who probably don’t like what I do, but they approve it. They get that my stuff is at least well thought out, that’s undeniable. But at the same time we’re never violating any codes or community standards.

LF: Your work often involves unique materials and craft. How do you source it all?

JS: What makes things go is that we have all these sources that are just like friends—we know them now. No one’s a salesperson here. We go to people when we need that product. We get it, we know what the price is. Everybody’s really more interested in making a product that’s going to be different, or fun, or add to something. For instance, we make all our lamps for the buildings. I just draw a picture and get the glass blown by Saul over here at Santa Barbara Art Glass. He’ll stop everything and make the lamps if we need him to.

LF: You’ve mentioned the influence of music. How does that play into your work?

JS: We were raised to be great appreciators of jazz. And once those patterns are set in your mind, you find yourself applying them to all sorts of other disciplines. People see jazz in my work, in certain flights of fancy, in syncopations. And of course the way all these different patterns can jam together—that’s definitely jazz.

LF: What’s your take on the future of building in fire-prone areas?

JS: We’re the only country that builds most of our residences out of wood all the time. And after they burn down we build them out of wood again.

“In the hills above our paradise of old school buildings [in Montecito] was the Mountain Drive community, where residents were building homes out of adobe, used lumber, wine bottles, and ferro-cement. Families were building homes like birds making nests, and this seemed like a fundamental part of life. Back then we didn’t call it recycling, we just used whatever was there.”

My Mexican clients won’t do it. They say, “Oh no, we’re going concrete.” But this is America. There are great ways to literally build back better and less combustible, but at the end of the day wood is cheap and plentiful, so that’s what we default to. And of course you can see the result on the news every day.

As Jeff Shelton and I conclude our talk, I stand up making sure not to bang my head on any of the architectural errata hanging from the ceiling including, oddly, a pendulum. The maneuver puts in my sightline early sketches, models, and tile samples for a civic commission Jeff ultimately landed: the revitalization of a freeway underpass at the end of State Street that leads to the ocean. Jeff Shelton has transformed what used to look like, well, a freeway underpass, into something of a grand entrance to this town—brightly welcoming visitors at Stearns Wharf to Santa Barbara and vice versa.

Somehow Jeff has transformed the space into more of an esplanade with all of the usual Shelton Brothers grace notes and cues: It’s freestyling. Welcoming. Exuberant. Joyful. It’s significant that such a central and definitive piece of architecture setting the tone for our town is by the jazz musician and architect Jeff Shelton. Just steps from the park named after the original curator of the Santa Barbara style, Pearl Chase, who left her imprint here pretty much exactly one hundred years hence.

Miles Davis once said, “If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.”

...Marc Appleton :

“When I started practicing many years ago in Santa Barbara, I noticed Jeff’s joyfully idiosyncratic work downtown. When I talked to other local architects about it, they were generally critical of it, but I found it refreshing, yet still appropriate to Santa Barbara’s urban history. I also suspect the adverse reactions were largely from architects who were at heart either modernists or uninspired traditionalists.

“In an article I wrote three years ago called, ‘New Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture in Santa Barbara: A Continuing Tradition or Rebirth?’, published in ANTA 4, the journal from Notre Dame, I included a couple of Jeff’s projects, and said this:

Jeff Shelton’s work has for the last two decades been enriching Santa Barbara’s downtown neighborhoods. Much of it has been accomplished for the same developer client, and it exhibits a dedication to hands-on craftsmanship that is rare in today’s construction industry. His buildings are considered by some critics to be overly playful, mannerist or ‘Gaudíesque,’ and they do stand out, like oddly-dressed out of town cousins come to visit, but they are clearly related to Santa Barbara’s local Spanish family. Closer examination shows a richly detailed array of softened, but colorful references to historic Spanish and Moorish forms, and an almost invariably human scale commensurate with some of the city’s best historic architecture.

“In short, Jeff is damn good, is winning new clients, and is finally being taken quite seriously—as well he should!”

HUT MAKER

attie Shelton’s alluring huts are a comparative stealth phenomenon and, once discovered, an occasion for happily arched eyebrows. A Shelton Hut is a functional objet d’art, an aesthetic statement you enter through a door.

“That first hut I built for myself,” Shelton says. “I was going to live in it for a couple months down at a friend’s co-op in L.A.” She pauses to marvel aloud. “That was a different phase,” she murmurs, then rejoins the conversation.

“I would work on my hut in my uncle’s steel shop, then wheel it over to my dad’s office at the end of the day to store it. One of my dad’s clients came in from Blue Sky Center, a nonprofit up in New Cuyama.” Jeff’s clients took one look at Mattie’s hut, misread the scene, and placed an order. “‘We want five of those, but three times the size,’” Shelton laughs. “I didn’t intend to start a business, but that ended up being the direction I went.”

For the past five years Shelton’s been an architect in training, her mentor a close acquaintance and acknowledged master; a father figure, say. Precisely a father figure, in fact. Hut production has, understandably, slowed to a stop. Still, her licensure goal has a singular focus.

“When I dive back into huts, it’ll be more from a design perspective.” Can she hang on to the gorgeous quirk? Shelton laughs anew. “I have plans to do some huts with steel frames and real insulation. But a lot of people see the canvas versions and they say, ‘I want that one.’”

STORY BY JEFF WING

PHOTOS BY KIM REIERSON

GLASS COMPLETELY FULL

aul Alcaraz, glass artist extraordinaire, has lived a life of blessed happenstance; an almost supernatural annealing of his once motile desires—to borrow from the chemical jibber-jabber of glassmaking.

“I was in my workshop on Mason Street putting together an installation for the lobby of the Mermaid Inn in Venice Beach,” says Alcaraz. “I had all the installation work right there by the door of my shop. You could see it from the street.”

A certain Jeff Shelton was driving down Mason at that moment. “I saw him looking in at the installation as he passed,” says Alcaraz. You know how these things go.

The car drove on and Alcaraz continued working for about a minute before the car appeared again, slowly backing up. Shelton parked on the narrow street, jumped out of his car and walked over to Alcaraz, standing at the shop threshold with his arms crossed like a sultan.

“He’s very serious,” Alcaraz says. “He’s looking at the lights of the installation. After a minute he goes back to his car and drives away. He didn’t say a word!” Saul looks about to laugh in the telling. “I’m like, whoa!” An hour later, Shelton returns with a couple other guys and a grinning question for Alcaraz. “Where have you been all this time?”

“They were building El Andaluz,” Alcaraz says of Shelton’s beloved and mostly indescribable masterpiece at 531 Chapala in Santa Barbara, a mixed-use, palatial phantasm with Moorish accents. “I had no idea who he was or anything. Jeff said, ‘Do you have a little time to look at a building for lights?’”

Saul Alcaraz has lived several lives. Traveling alone at 13, stateside relatives picked him up at the border. “They put me on a plane to L.A., gave me $50. In L.A., I bought a ticket on the Greyhound, and Santa Barbara was as far as I could go. Whatever Santa Barbara was.” In his adoptive and accidental hometown, full circles would surround Alcaraz like the concentric rings of a tossed coin in a wishing well.

Taken in by a kindly Santa Barbara family whose beautiful daughter, Gina, Alcaraz would later marry, the gentleman of the house was himself a master glassblower, though Alcaraz never saw him doing the work. He would discover glassblowing on his own terms one day while walking to his ESL class at SBCC—a “road to Damascus” moment.

Years later in their fledgling partnership, Shelton would recommend Alcaraz investigate Catalan architect, designer, and patron saint of the freed form, Antoni Gaudí. Alcaraz took his family along on his Barcelona pilgrimage. He has never looked back.

“I made the first samples, and Jeff was like, oh my God. Exactly. That’s it!” Saul laughs. “It’s the happiness of it, you know. It’s the happiness of it.”

Alcaraz (seated) with fellow glassblowing artist and father-in-law Mario Real.

IN BOOK FORM

he best way to capture the essence of Shelton’s handiwork is with your own eyes while strolling the gilded paths of downtown Santa Barbara that house his designs. But there’s also a portable, keep-at-home compilation of Shelton’s architecture in the guise of an award-winning monograph, The Fig District, with words and artwork by Shelton himself, photography by Jason Rick, and layout by daughter Mattie Shelton. Shelton covers all the hits in glorious minute detail: the crustacean tilework of El Zapato; the mosaic facade of Vera Cruz; the leafy balconies of El Jardin. No squiggly iron railing is left out and every fanciful detail gets its story told.

BUILDING FAMILY, CRAFT, AND ARTISTRY

n Santa Barbara’s eclectic architectural landscape, Upton Construction has carved out a reputation for craftsmanship that balances playful imagination with technical precision. At the helm is Matt Metcalfe, who took over the company in 2021 after more than two decades working alongside founder Dan Upton. What makes Matt’s story compelling isn’t just his ability to pour concrete in challenging conditions or clad a mountain house entirely in steel, but the way he weaves construction into a broader tapestry of family—both his own crew and the ever-expanding circle of collaborators like architect Jeff Shelton.

BUILDING SHELTON’S VISION

To build a Shelton design is to embrace the unexpected. Curves bend where right angles usually reign, steel towers rise where traditional stucco might stand, and details drawn on cocktail napkins evolve into full-scale

architectural statements. Matt calls it both an honor and a challenge: Shelton’s work demands rigor while inviting joy. Upton Construction translates these sketches into lasting structures—concrete towers, sculptural homes, even community landmarks like Santa Barbara’s Community Arts Workshop. As Matt notes, the trick is to preserve Shelton’s vision with seriousness, so the playfulness feels authentic, never contrived.

A RANGE OF STYLES, A SINGULAR CARE

While Shelton’s designs are the most recognizable, Matt is quick to remind that Upton Construction does it all. From sleek steel-and-glass residences to more modest family homes, the company thrives on variety. Concrete remains a specialty—pouring entire buildings with nothing else—but experimenting with materials keeps the team sharp. “It’s fun to mix it up,” Matt says, noting that each new material forces them to think differently about

how pieces connect. Whether downtown statement projects or simple, durable family homes, Upton’s range is proof that versatility can be a craft in itself.

THE FAMILY WITHIN THE WORK

Much of Upton Construction’s strength comes from its people. Many employees have been with the company for 15 to 20 years, creating a tight-knit crew that can take a project from slab to finish almost entirely in-house. Plumbers, electricians, and tilers often wear all three hats—ensuring continuity, speed, and a shared pride in the finished product. Subcontractors, too, are welcomed into this culture, moving from project to project like extended relatives. “It’s a family for sure,” Matt says. “Even when we’re digging a foundation in the rain, there’s still laughter.”

BUILDING IN THE SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY

That sense of family extends to the broader circle of Shelton collaborators. Weekly meetings between Matt, Dan, and Jeff often blur the line between work and camaraderie—problem solving over beers as much as on-site. Even Tuesday nights at James Joyce pub become part of the architecture of this community, where builders, artists, and architects swap stories as easily as they share tacos on a job site.

In the end, what Matt and Upton Construction deliver isn’t just homes or landmarks, but spaces infused with care, collaboration, and joy. It’s construction as craft, but also as family—whether that’s the Uptons, the crew, or the colorful collective orbiting Jeff Shelton’s pencil.

uptonconstruction.com

WHERE WALLS COME TO LIFE

alk down a Santa Barbara street where architect Jeff Shelton has left his mark and you’ll know immediately. Walls curve instead of standing rigid, colors play off the light, and the plaster surfaces themselves seem alive— rippling, glowing, or drawing the eye to unexpected details. Behind those finishes is Specialty Plastering, the team that has mastered the art of turning Shelton’s whimsical visions into lasting reality.

A RANGE OF EXPERTISE

Specialty Plastering’s artistry extends well beyond Shelton’s fantastical façades. Their services span Venetian plaster polished to a marble-like sheen, lime finishes that breathe naturally with a building, decorative moldings, exterior stucco systems, and custom finishes designed for projects of every scale. Whether shaping the character of a contemporary residence or adding texture to a bustling commercial space, they bring versatility and precision to every surface.

This range ensures they can work seamlessly across projects, adapting their craft to complement the architecture rather than overshadow it. For Specialty Plastering, plaster is never just a wall covering—it’s the element that sets the tone of the entire space.

DO IT ONCE, DO IT RIGHT

At the heart of the company’s philosophy is a simple but powerful principle: do it once, and do it right. That means beginning with the highest-quality materials, from time-tested lime plasters to carefully chosen aggregates. Each layer is applied with intention, balancing beauty and strength to ensure a finish that is built to endure.

It’s a standard that goes beyond aesthetics. Specialty Plastering’s clients know they aren’t just getting something that looks remarkable on day one—they’re getting surfaces that will remain strong and elegant for decades. In an industry where cutting corners often leads to costly repairs down the road, Specialty Plastering’s guarantee of longevity sets them apart.

A TASTE FOR THE WILD SIDE

Nowhere is their blend of craftsmanship and creativity more evident than in their collaborations with Jeff Shelton. Shelton’s architecture is unapologetically bold— walls curve like waves, details demand custom solutions, and no two projects look alike. For plasterers, this means constant problem-solving, invention, and artistry.

Specialty Plastering has become Shelton’s concrete counterpart. They translate his free-flowing designs into tangible forms, crafting plaster surfaces that highlight the architecture’s playful spirit while ensuring the durability to withstand time and weather. The partnership has become a hallmark of Santa Barbara’s architectural landscape: Shelton imagines, and Specialty Plastering builds finishes that make those dreams endure.

A REPUTATION YOU CAN TRUST

Specialty Plastering’s success ultimately rests on trust. Architects, designers, and homeowners return to them because they deliver not just artistry, but assurance. Their work is grounded in accountability: every project is completed with the intention that it will stand strong, both structurally and aesthetically, for years to come.

For those seeking more than a surface solution, Specialty Plastering offers something rare. Their walls tell stories, capture imagination, and carry a guarantee of quality that lasts a lifetime.

(805) 966-3858

“Sustainability only works if it’s accessible to everyone,” says Lindsay Rose Medoff (center) with Isaac Kinsey (left), and Silvia Acevedo.

REINVENTING FASHION FROM THE FABRIC OF WASTE

BY HEIDI CLEMENTS | PHOTOS BY KIM REIERSON

While performing my semiannual and usually uneventful closet clean out earlier this year, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my own excess. I live in a guest house which means my closet can only hold two seasons at once, so when spring starts springing it’s time for the furry frocks and parka lights to go live on the other side of the property in a small pink tool shed. My own little Barbie closet for my seasonally departing duds. But somehow this season I had more stuff than usual. It’s like my closet became a breeding ground for clothing and was giving birth to more pants and tops while I slept. It was time to make some cuts. Unload all the things I don’t really wear. A full refresh.

I was Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill, only the hill was the trek to my car trunk and the rock was six giant bright pink Amazon storage bags of unwanted items. (I thought they would match the shed.) “Marie Kondo has nothing on me,” I yelled as I shoved it all in my Subaru. Look at what a good human I am giving away my unwanted things. I hopped over to the Goodwill Center in Downtown Santa Barbara and as I stood before the shocking amount of other bins filled with other good humans’ unwanted things I thought—where does all this stuff go if it doesn’t sell here? It was the first time I had ever asked that question. It turns out my shopping obsession is killing the planet. And so is yours.

We love things—new things are especially beloved—in fact Americans on average buy about 53 new items of clothing per year. According to consumer advocate Public Interest Research Group, that’s four times the amount we purchased in 2000. I believe I’m slightly above average as someone who puts together outfits on Instagram under the cutesy slogan GRWM, or “Get Ready With Me,” each day. I’m convincing people to buy new things when apparently, the only new thing we’re all going to need is a hazmat suit while we get ready for global warming at the hand of our own hand-me-downs. Death by a nice double-pleated Donegal tweed skirt, or dare I say, one of those Walmart Birkins that only cost about 40 bucks and are the fashion equivalent of a single-use straw.

Americans throw out about 17 million tons of clothing and textiles each year and 65% of that is thrown out within 12 months of purchase. Fashion waste experts have suggested that if we stopped the production of all clothing right now, the sheer excess of clothes in existence could outfit the next six generations of humans. So, what’s the solution?

T“WE TAKE TRASH AND TURN IT INTO SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL”

ucked on an industrial side street in downtown Los Angeles sits SUAY, or The SUAY Center for Repair and Reuse. The neighborhood itself feels like an abandoned movie set for an apocalyptic blockbuster: graffiti-filled warehouse garage doors, big loud trucks rolling through, the faint sound of music coming from a coffee shop that may or may not be open. If I didn’t know it was 2025, I’d think we were about to film the “Beat It” video.

But enter the bright doorway of SUAY and you’ll find a very cool, very hip clothing and home goods store that only features products made from recycled textiles. I have never not left the store without a bag full of beautiful unique items. One of my most treasured? The Towel Jacket. (I actually own two.) It’s one of their bestsellers perhaps because it’s incredibly cool and in a pinch very useful. My brown one has perfectly mopped a car coffee spill on more than one occasion and kept it well hidden. None of their items ended up in my pink Goodwill bags.

“ W e joke that our pillows are ‘voted best pillows in the universe by the SUAY customer,’ which is the only official vote that matters,” says SUAY founder Lindsay Rose Medoff. The pillows and napkins are made out of deadstock linen, dyed with low impact dyes. “These napkins support garment workers. These napkins support traceable textile recycling.”

That is the heart of SUAY. Medoff, who calls herself a reluctant but dedicated CEO, imparts a simple but powerful mission: give discarded textiles a second life. SUAY emerged from decades of thrifting, sewing, and a deep discomfort with the culture of newness in fashion.

Working closely with Tina, a Thai seamstress and mentor for over 20 years, Medoff helped build SUAY into a hub for circular fashion innovation, community dye baths, and textile repairs. The name “SUAY” comes from the Thai word “swy,” which means “beautiful,” a nod to their ethos of finding beauty in the discarded.

In the early days those textiles were supplied by large brands like Patagonia who hired SUAY to upcycle their unusable garments. Then the pandemic hit and Medoff and her team decided to start doing their own thing.

FROM THE ASHES ROSE AN IDEA

Enter the L.A. fires and life once again shifted for this tiny company in a very big way. “We got calls from donation centers days after the fires,” Medoff tells me. “They had collected hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothing and didn’t know what to do with the excess. There’s no real disaster relief system for textiles. Why don’t we have fully circular operations? Why are we not funding systems like this? We took in 120,000 pounds of unwanted textiles from about 18% of donation sites across Los Angeles and launched our textile rapid response program. Our message, ‘Hey, don’t throw this in a landfill.’” SUAY is now the proud renter of a 4,000-square-foot warehouse full of your unwanted clothing.

THE OIL SPILL THAT SPAWNED A MOVEMENT

N ot destroying the planet is a common goal of my community here in Santa Barbara, considered the birthplace of the environmental movement when President Nixon set up the EPA after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill—the largest in U.S. waters at the time. Santa Barbara hosted the first Earth Day Festival in 1970. And while too many t-shirts may not seem as detrimental to the planet as an oil spill, it’s also devastating.

*The fashion industry contributes nearly 10% of global carbon emissions.

*20% of global wastewater is linked to textile dyeing.

*Up to 500,000 tons of microfibers are released into the ocean annually from synthetic clothing.

A GLOBAL CLOTHING CRISIS

Our textile overconsumption is no longer just an American problem. The fast fashion industry (companies like Shein) is a behemoth producing between 80 and 100 billion garments annually, drowning the planet in its excess. Most of it is made in China and while the tariffs may raise the price tags, it will most likely not stop the sale of a five-dollar shirt that’s showcasing the latest trend to a teenager on Instagram who has to look cool or be a laughing stock at school. Only 1% of these get recycled into new clothing. The rest? Lost to landfills, oceans, and incinerators. It seems we have learned nothing since the sirens were sounded about our planet in 2006 with Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

In Ghana, the world’s largest importer of used clothing, the situation is dire. Their formerly serene beachfront is fast fashion’s dumping ground with a 10-foot-high wall of clothing surrounding a sea of unsold, unworn overstocked textiles. They float in the ocean and form tangled knotted strips of clothing “tentacles” that are strangling all ocean life in its path.

Says Medoff, “The Global North has dumped its trash on other communities for years. We force people to take and pay for our textiles. Traders pay on average between $120-200 a bale. They sell what they can but a staggering 40% of the average bale is waste.”

The math isn’t mathing. The planet is dying. No one needs a cute outfit to attend this funeral.

While Medoff and the people at SUAY understand the importance of how we dress, she is deeply committed to finding a solution. “Fashion is such a beautiful gift that humanity has to express itself, but we’ve gotten truly lost on our way. The goal is to help people reconnect to that in a better way.”

A graveyard of unwanted clothing takes over a beach in Ghana. (Photo by Muntaka Chasant)

A FULL-CIRCLE MODEL OF SUSTAINABILITY

Most recently, “SUAY It Forward” was born. It’s the company’s newest textile recycling program. For $20, customers can fill a bag with unwanted textiles. In return, they get a $20 store credit. “We have a fully circular, no-export, no-landfill model,” Medoff explains. “We’ve moved through over seven million pounds of textiles in just a few years with barely any outside funding.”

There’s also the Community Dye Bath—a SUAY trademark and another pillar of their model. For a few dollars, customers can bring in clothes and breathe new life into them with low-impact, rotating seasonal dyes. To date, they’ve dyed and refreshed over 2.5 million pounds of textiles. And Medoff hopes her message catches on.

“SUAY is a viable business,” she says. “People can do this in their communities. There could be 300 SUAYs across the U.S. We need aligned people who believe manual labor is skilled labor and the future is reparative.”

THE FUTURE IS REPARATIVE

Despite operating with minimal funding and a team of just 45 people, SUAY is proving what’s possible. They still consult for other brands, design upcycled collections, and even provide sustainable event services. But at its core, SUAY is about repair—of clothes, of systems, of values. “Sustainability only works if it’s accessible to everyone,” says Medoff.

Isaac Kinsey, Director of Outreach and Communications, calls working at SUAY an opportunity to save the planet one shirt and pair of pants at a time. Production Manager Silvia Acevedo agrees. “We take trash and turn it into something beautiful. It’s not easy but it’s fun. I always find beauty in trash.”

Medoff has her eye on the future. “We want to grow. We want to recycle more. Educate people. Create jobs. Make an impact. We’re doing it every day with such minimal resources—like three Sharpies, some duct tape, and ten dollars. But, it’s possible.”

SUAY isn’t a trend. It’s a movement. And they’re building it one stitch, one story, and one second life at a time.

WE TREAT BIG AND SMALL DREAMS WITH THE SAME ENTHUSIASM.

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THEM’S THE BREAKS

BY JONAS OPPENHEIM

Photo courtesy of Rob Strati

ROB STRATI DISHES ON HIS GREAT HAUL OF CHINA

When something precious breaks, you have options. You can replace it, or you can reach for the Gorilla Glue, and of course you can weep. Or, you can do what the artist Rob Strati does. His new series, “Fragmented,” combines broken china, his own hand-wrought illustration, and sculpture into expressions of both grief and acceptance. In other words, he picked up the pieces, and made them into moving artworks. Perhaps we should call it…

Photo by Adam Reich

...BREAKING GOOD

Other artists have worked in the broken plate medium. Julian Schnabel repurposed broken plates into stunning works of art and became the darling of the art world for it. The Japanese have their art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold. But what Strati does is different. He’s neither reassembling, nor repurposing. Instead, he sees the narratives from the original shattered china not so much broken as broken open.

“It’s free drawing,” says Strati, “which is a little stressful.”

For Strati, a New York-based, Ohio-raised artist, the object of involuntary deconstruction was a dear family heirloom, a Blue Willow china salad plate that his wife had

inherited from her late mother. The plate slipped from Jocelyn’s fingers, exploding on the kitchen floor. Bereft, they left the largest shard on the kitchen island for months until Strati’s artist-brain had enough time to cogitate on the plate’s decoration.

The plate depicted ancient Chinese imagery, as interpreted by English designers in the 1700s: trees with geometric foliage, wooden pavilions, tiny monks crossing a stone bridge. “The most classic—what you think of as a China plate, the blue China plate—it was that one,” says Strati. “Those are very specific kinds of drawings and patterns. They’re geometric, angular, almost mathematical. And then you look at these European plates with botanical edges, leaves and branches; different scenes.”

Strati reflected on what was potentially missing from the scene and what else might be possible. “I just saw

this world beyond the little fragment,” Strati says, “and I thought, okay, I need to make that.” He placed the shard on white drawing paper and began sketching a continuation of the plate’s illustration, extending the scene past its round confines.

Moved by Strati’s creation, Jocelyn posted a photo on Facebook. The reaction was avid, especially considering—or perhaps because of—the day’s other big news. It was January 6th, 2021.

Over 75 broken plates and many gallery shows later, “Fragmented” has evolved as Strati perfects his process of making beauty out of damage.

Photo by Adam Reich

THE FAMOUS IMPORT-EXPORT MAN GENGHIS KHAN IS CREDITED WITH SPREADING THE TRADE OF CHINA WESTWARD, LIKE THE MOST VIOLENT TUPPERWARE PARTY EVER.

YOUR COASTAL GRANDMA’S PLATE WALL JUST GOT A LOT MORE INTERESTING

Strati has a method. Step one is to acquire a sacrificial dish from Etsy or eBay. Step two is to drop it on a smashing stone. There’s a correct way to break a plate and it helps to have a nice, muscular stone. (Strati can’t rely on his wife to magically produce the perfect shard every time she drops an invaluable family keepsake.) Doing it the other way, dropping the stone onto the plate, however, is a no-go: “You don’t want the plates to shatter,” says Strati. “You want them to break.”

Once the plate is properly broken, Strati grabs his pen and creatively expands the plate’s universe. The world of the plate is set free, like when Jeff Daniels steps out of the movie screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, but without all that Woody Allen baggage. Streams burble into the foreground, ships navigate placid rivieri, birds flap toward the horizon. Through the work, Strati dialogues with the original artists, exploring their motifs. “Like the Chinese monks— how did they draw the monks? Then there are the nautical scenes; I’d be working on the ocean, and I think, how does this wave hit this other wave? How do I go into their world?”

Drawing mini-monks and wave-traffic isn’t as relaxing as it sounds; because Strati is free-drawing, without penciling or sketching, any mistake must be incorporated into the composition—creating an artform within an artform.

Strati’s drawings are clean, detailed, and beautiful, but beholding the destruction visited upon antiques is startlingly visceral. That may be due to the china’s rich history and elevated status. The craft grew out of China circa 800 BC. The moniker comes from the long tradition of naming things for their places of origin, like the hallowed envelopes of Manila, or the majestic chicken wings of Buffalo.

Photo by Jorge Morocho

A HISTORY OF BREAKAGE

The famous import-export man Genghis Khan (emperor was his side hustle) is credited with spreading the trade of china westward, like the most violent Tupperware party ever. Royalty amassed the fine ceramic, as did aspiring elites. By the 17th century, Europeans developed high-quality versions, including the gruesomely named “fine bone china.” When Europeans colonized North America, the china came too, along with its status-symbol cache, making its way onto the cabinet shelves of coastal grandmothers everywhere. What a journey, only to end up in a heap on Rob Strati’s kitchen tile.

Which returns us to the question of how to process sudden, painful breakage.

Strati could have Frankensteined his Blue Willow plate back together. Instead, he made art. “It’s all about these accidents, and accepting things that are broken that don’t work out,” he says.

I can think of larger, more pressing types of fragmentation, like that of our democratic institutions and societal norms. And so can Strati. He’s on the case, developing a subseries called “Service,” using plates with historical imagery—the White House, the Capitol, etc.—to “explore our current political landscape.” “The Precedent,” for instance, features a George Washington commemorative plate (but, you know, broken).

Whether it’s a volatile democracy or a cherished heirloom, being human means accepting that breakage happens. I find comfort in Strati’s lively worlds. They show us that something better can emerge from those ruptures. Don’t panic, they urge—just pull out your smashing stone and break better. Coastal grandmas take note.

Every Orchid Has a Story

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FOR THE LOVE OF VINTAGE CARS

BY JOE DONNELLY | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN ANNETTI

JOHNNY VACAY’S ENDLESS SUMMERS, ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT, AND STRATEGICALLY-PLACED POSTCARDS

It’s 2021, and the psychic cloud of Covid-19 hovers over us, interminable and gray, like an implacable winter day. Not that we could see it, stuck inside as we were. Still, a few silver linings manage to pierce the gloom, not the least of which is a revival of rustic

nostalgia: a desire for simpler times, sunnier times—and for the collectibles that evoke them. Seriously, raise your hand if you didn’t binge-watch Lonesome Dove and seek out an O’Keefe & Merritt stove to go with your newfound commitment to baking sourdough bread from scratch.

JOHN ANNETTI

Aless obvious vintage treasure waiting at the end of Covid-inspired hobby trails, along with canning garden-grown tomatoes and adding to your vinyl (country roots) record collection, was none other than the gone-but-not-quite-forgotten Ford Bronco.

Introduced in 1966 with the tagline “a breed apart,” the Bronco was designed to appeal to both suburban weekend warriors and real-deal caballeros. The Bronco seemed to anticipate a burgeoning cultural ambivalence towards the suburbanization of America and managed to corral our freerange ids into an iconic four-wheel drive with classic styling. During peak Covid, the Bronco became something of a collector’s craze, with demand and prices skyrocketing between 2020-2022—doubling in the case of third-gen Broncos. Meeting the moment, perhaps, Ford reintroduced into production the iconic model in 2021 after a quartercentury hiatus, as if to help shake us out of our malaise. The move was met with two-year waiting lists.

Serendipitously, budding lifestyle brand Johnny Vacay couldn’t have picked a better moment to launch its Ride series of coffee-table books. Beach Rides debuted in 2021 with a vintage, Robin’s-egg-blue Ford Bronco on the cover, parked at a perfect 235 degree angle on a patch of warm sand with American beachgrass and cirrus-textured blue skies filling out the frame. Into our Covid gray came a burst of light, a breath of fresh air and a perfectly timed reminder of when we imagined ourselves a breed apart. John Annetti and Whitney Hubbell, the partners in life, crime, and publishing behind Beach Rides and the ensuing Mountain Rides and Surf Rides, had no way of knowing how much we wanted to reach the beach when they started cooking up the gorgeous compendium. The origin story goes back years, and the couple were just following their passions for adventure, photography, and storytelling, casting about for a way to turn a lifestyle into a livelihood.

For Annetti, a self-described “blue-collar” kid from Dedham, Mass, that involved a post-collegiate period of seeking an endless summer of the soul, one that could accommodate all seasons and wouldn’t be constrained by cubicles, bosses, or any kind of prescribed life. After graduating from the New England Institute of Art in the early 2010s, he started working around Newport (the Rhode Island one), sometimes as a valet, sometimes as a deckhand, and sometimes shooting

weddings and bat mitzvahs.

Annetti was facing another brutal New England winter when a friend offered him an escape. “I had a buddy that was in St. John, and he said, ‘Just come crash on my couch.’ And I said, ‘Screw it,’ and moved down there. I think I was 22.”

Soon, Annetti started a t-shirt line featuring photographs of locals’ rides he saw around town. It was a way to combine his interest in aspirational destinations and the things that

“ I’m about to go to press with a new book called Golf Bum, which is a book about a golf course photographer who broke the record for 18-hole golf courses played in a year. He played 580 different rounds of 18-holes, bought an RV and cruised around the country.”

represented them with his love for photography. Johnny Vacay, his nom de vroom, was born.

The prodigal son returned to New England from the Caribbean and landed in Nantucket for the summer of 2018. By then, the t-shirt line was stagnant, but the dream still had life. Annetti took notice of the gloriously analog vehicles that would eventually populate Beach Rides and started leaving postcards on the windshields of those vehicles he found particularly compelling.

JOHN ANNETTI

To his delight, not only were the owners’ responses 100 percent, but their stories were as compelling as their cars. In fact, the cars were, pardon the pun, vehicles for Annetti and Hubbell to transport us into their subjects’ fascinating lives.

Annetti shot the rides and the riders. Hubbell, his then-girlfriend, now-wife, started telling their stories— stories that spoke of geography and generations, stories that turned the objects into totems and the totems into legacies. A great example is Telluride ski patroller Jason “Monk” Franck and his workhorse 1964 Jeep CJ-5. It would be hard to tell the story of the man without his ride and vice versa. Together, they transported me back to my years snowboarding and playing music in Vail, where I arrived in the summer of 1990 in a 1983 soft top, 4 cylinder CJ-5.

At the time it wasn’t just a ride and a destination, it was a declaration of independence for a young man seeking his path. I’m pretty sure I bumped elbows with “Monk” during one of my numerous lost weekends in Telluride. The point is, with these books, you may come for the rides, but you’ll stay for the people.

For example, Santa Barbarans may be familiar with kind-faced Michael Bolton who is featured in Surf Rides. Of his cream colored, 1974 Toyota FJ40 Landcruiser, Bolton says, “It’s not even a car to me; it’s a meditation machine.” Or Rincon regular Lindsay Dill, who moved to Santa Barbara and calls her gold 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300 CD “the Space Cowboy.”

It’s been more than a decade since Annetti set out for the Caribbean to make his own declaration of independence. He tells me the Johnny Vacay story from the back deck of his Denver-area home. The fresh-faced, boyish young man who appears in the foreword to Beach Rides hugging his future wife on the sands of a Nantucket beach is now a new dad whose hair has a touch of gray and the red eyes of someone kept up all night by a twomonth-old baby boy. There are new prerogatives in place—a growing family and a growing business—but what compels Annetti and Hubbell remains the same: take pictures, tell stories, help us all reach the beach, climb the mountain, surf the wave.

With Beach Rides , Mountain Rides , Surf Rides , and the just-released Beach Bum , Johnny Vacay has transcended the typical coffee table book convention and given us something more capacious. Artful as they are, these books are not just objets d’art. They are meant to be thumbed through, returned to, and inspired by. The people who populate them may live in hallowed locales, but they’re locals. They might be your friends and neighbors and their stories, like their rides, are worth knowing—and remembering.

JOHN ANNETTI

I get the feeling you developed the Johnny Vacay brand as an alternative to getting sucked into corporate life. Yeah, that was never an option for me. We grew up blue collar in Boston and I had jobs since I was young and I did everything and realized that working for someone sucked and I just couldn’t do that. My dad gave me a camera when I was 11 years old, and it sounds cliché, but it just never left my hand. That was something that I knew from a very early age, that that’s what I was going to do. So yeah, it was always that for me and there was never a plan B.

You said you grew up working class outside of Boston and suddenly, in some ways, you were thrown into a more bespoke world in which you’re serving the masters of the universe—being a deckhand or working on their boats.

Yeah, I was living and hanging and playing in places where the rich and famous were doing the same. We were working, but we’re also commingling at the same time. And I don’t know, I feel like I came in with the perspective of never having seen this world before. I wasn’t enthralled by the glitz and glam. I was more intrigued by the beauty

JOHN ANNETTI

of the places and the lifestyles, and that’s what intrigued me to keep going. But it was interesting because I was also selling stuff to these people.

The books started organically and locally out of the remnants of the original t-shirt brand, now they’re the cornerstone of an expanding brand. Are you getting more national distribution?

Yeah, we never really went down the publishing route as far as the stereotypical way of doing it, like with a big-five publisher. We did it independently. It’s been a slow burn. But we started with that one book [Beach Rides] and then we made two other books [Mountain Rides and Surf Rides] within three years. I think it was three books in four years. And we did it all ourselves.

But it’s taken a while. We’re still bootstraps, very tight, but we’re hitting an inflection point where we’ve been around long enough that people are

recognizing us, and every new title that we come out with just has that distribution network that we can plug in and, boom, there’s a new book and everyone wants it.

The stories are fun to read, and the people are compelling. Coffee table books don’t usually have this much context.

My wife is a wonderful writer and she took these people’s stories—the photography is great, but when you actually read the story, it’s just so beautifully written about these people’s lives. And that, I feel like, is what makes the Ride series so special. It’s got a cool cover, it’s got these cool trucks

on it, but when you dive in and you actually read about the lifestyles and the family history, you don’t see that often.

I like that they’re geographically focused as well because you can learn the history of those areas through the subject’s stories. The people and places are as much the subject as the rides themselves. Call it: people, place, and thing. That’s what we like to write about. You take an object, whether it’s a car, or a bar—we’re trying to do some other stuff—and where it’s generally located and the people surrounded by it, and it seems like it’s been a really great combination.

Obviously, there’s something aspirational in here, and given that the locations where most of this is set are beyond the reach of most people now—it wasn’t like that when I was a ski bum. But the books are evocative—maybe of a time when these places were more accessible? Or, aspirational—in the sense that we yearn for that simpler, more analog, more mechanical time?

The reason why they’re not attainable anymore is because they are so special. Take Aspen for example. That place, geographically, is so special and so amazing, and has been for generations. People have caught on. We like to tell stories about the real

people who live there who have been there for that long and that use the island and mountain town for what it actually is and show it in a light that’s not glitz and glam. I’ve just so happened to hang out in these places that I think are cool, that other people think are cool, and try to tell some local stories and show it in a different light.

So, you might not be able to get here yourself, but you can experience it a little bit and— Yeah, that’s just what’s happened with the books. I don’t know if that was my intention, to show people these places that are expensive to travel to. It’s just the book we made, and if it does that, then great. My biggest fear is to seem pretentious, because we’re hanging out in these places. It’s like, “Oh, they’re in Aspen. They’re in Martha’s Vineyard.” We like these places because they are special, not because of the hype.

Well, I think you do a good job of having a diverse, at least sociologically, mix of people. It’s not just celebrities, or the privileged.

When I got out of college in 1986, I drove across the country in a Chevy Astro Van with a couple of friends, just a mattress and a couple of lawn chairs in the back— Dude, that’s what it’s all about.

When we got to Aspen, I was like, “Holy shit, I’m going to live here someday.” I didn’t quite get to Aspen but made it to Vail in a Jeep CJ5. It’s the only aspirational car I ever had.

Wait, you drove a CJ from New York to Colorado?

Yeah, and when I was going up over the Continental Divide around Breckenridge, I was like, “What’s wrong with this car?” The carburetor wasn’t adjusted for the altitude. And going through Kansas—

I think about that all the time when I drive from Denver to the mountains, like, “I can’t believe people used to do this in the ‘70s in their Broncos and Jeeps.”

Yeah, soft top and all, blowing all around the place. When I left to do my first winter in Aspen, my dad pulled

JOHN ANNETTI

a 1996 two-door Honda Civic out of the woods of a house he was redoing. He’s pretty handy. He threw a battery in it, cleaned it up, and I drove that from Dedham (Mass) to Aspen. And I’ve this great picture on top of Independence Pass… It felt like we were driving to the moon.

Maybe “Beaters” is one of your next titles. Yeah, absolutely.

What are your next titles?

We just launched Beach Bum. We’re on this Bum series. Beach Bum is my memoir of sorts, a roundup of 17 years of my beach photography and travels from around the world. Like I said, I was 21ish when I started to travel and take photography seriously. So, it started from there and it tells the progression of the Johnny Vacay story.

I’m about to go to press with a new book called Golf Bum, which is a book about a golf course photographer who broke the record for 18-hole golf courses played in a year. He played 580 different rounds of 18-holes, bought an RV and cruised around the country.

Will that focus on the different landscapes of golf courses?

Yeah, it’s broken up by states or locations—44 states, plus Finland and Sweden. It’s very picture-heavy, traditional coffee-table style, with little four- or five-sentence snippets of whatever happened in that state.

So, is this the end of the Rides for now?

Yes, it took me so long to make those books. We want to broaden our titles and explore other lifestyles we’re interested in.

Tell me about the process.

So, the first Beach Rides, we spent the whole summer on the island [Nantucket] crashing with our friend who owns Nantucket Surf Club while still selling tee shirts at his shop. That was the easiest one to make because we were in one location. We made postcards that said, “We’re making a book. We’d love to have you in it. Contact information on the back.”

And throughout the summer, every car that we liked, we would slip this postcard underneath the windshield wiper. And pretty much everyone called us back and that’s how that was made. And then we quickly went to Mountain Rides, which is actually the only book that has all four seasons, which is my favorite aspect.

It’s my favorite as well.

I spent a whole summer home-basing out of the in-laws’ [near Aspen], which, kudos to them. But we would travel to all these different places, I would go to Telluride for a

long weekend and literally just drive up and down every single street, whether it was parked in the parking lot or the driveway… we’d go there, we’d distribute the cards, and then they’d call us back and then we’d have to go back and shoot. So that process just took so long. And from start to finish, the Mountain Rides and Surf Rides was an 18-month process. With Surf Rides, we bought an RV. I drove from Denver to Idaho to pick it up, drove it back to Denver, then drove it from Denver to San Clemente to start the trip. It took seven months.

You went north?

Yeah, we started from SoCal and went all the way up to San Francisco and then onto Bend, Oregon, to see a

friend. And then we hit every single surf town and we would camp out for five, six days and I would just unhitch the trailer and I would drive all day long, every street, every surf spot and do the same thing, find cars.

Just looking for the vehicle that spoke to you?

That’s really the only way you could do it. There’s no other way to really find that true, authentic person randomly. We took that first three months to drive up. We thought that we could shoot it along the way, but you know how June Gloom and May Gray goes. I didn’t want the entire book to be gray. So, we took an extra three months and waited for the fall when the weather gets really nice and we made our way all the

way down back to SoCal and scheduled shoots along the way. And so that was a seven-month process, just creating the content.

Which one sold the most and why?

Beach Rides is the clear winner. I think it’s the aesthetic of the book. It’s very beachy colors, light blue, tan, it fits very well in a coastal environment. And the Ford Bronco [on the cover]... We hit the Ford Bronco craze just perfectly.

Do you have one that’s your favorite?

Oh, it’s like trying to pick your favorite child. The first book was just so innocent for us. It was this thing that

JOHN

ANNETTI

“I like patina; something that’s been used, that’s been beat up, that hasn’t been babied. To take something that’s brand new and use it and beat it up and not necessarily care about it, but use it for what it’s meant for.”

we had an idea and we went for it. And it’s paid for a lot of stuff in my life, which is really nice, and it helped us grow the business. Mountain Rides is special, especially to me, because it has all four seasons and it profiles the mountains, which, it’s hard to pick which, beach or mountain for me…

It sounds like the mountains might be your home. I’ve been on a 20-year quest to try to figure out where home is, whether that be by the ocean or in the mountains. And I’ve succumbed to the mountains where I’ve been at peace that we will live in the mountains and then we will travel to the ocean. It was going to be one or the other.

Right?

And then Surf Rides is super special to me because it’s the only book that profiles a specific group. Everyone in that book is a surfer. And surfing has always been something that I thought that I could really just blow my life away with. And so, when we made Surf Rides, there was always something in the back of my head that I really wanted to dive deeper into that culture and throw myself into it, and I had the opportunity to do that. So, to profile a sport and a lifestyle, that was pretty special to me.

That UFO guy [owner of a tricked-out RV called UFO featured in Surf Rides] is amazing.

Unbelievable. There are so many characters in there.

Even the cover shot, Marc Andreini is just this legendary longboard shaper. And all these people in that book, to me, they’re super interesting. And that surfing element, it’s like a religion, it’s a lifestyle. Yeah, the surf book, it’s got something special to it.

How do you decide when to drop the postcard on someone’s windshield?

I like patina; something that’s been used, that’s been beat up, that hasn’t been babied. To take something that’s brand new and use it and beat it up and not necessarily care about it, but use it for what it’s meant for.

So, you don’t like them being fetishized objects?

I can admire and appreciate a cherry car. There’s a couple of cherries in there that get babied, but they still get used. But yeah, not that interesting to me. There’s no story behind it, there’s no grit.

What’s your ride?

I don’t have one yet. All that cash is paying for inventory. But it’s changed over the years, I just want an old beater pickup truck. I want a ranch, or a little farm with a cool pickup. I think that is my move at this point.

There are some values, I think, to your credit and your wife’s credit, that seep through the books and make them a little bit different; there’s also an homage to, I think, some American values that I think we’ve— Lost along the way? For sure.

Yeah, I can barely even screw in a lightbulb, but I’m like, “Yeah, let’s get the ranch and the horses.”

That whole lifestyle, that’s in our blood and our genes. There’s something more on a cellular level. At least for me, it is. When I see that lifestyle and you get on a horse, it’s just like... You can feel it in your bones. It’s like, “I want to

“ We would camp out for five, six days and I would just unhitch the trailer and I would drive all day long, every street, every surf spot and do the same thing, find cars.”

Johnny Vacay’s husband and wife co-founders, photographer John Annetti and author Whitney Hubbell.

do this forever.” Like surfing, it’s like there is a relationship with nature that is just deeper than what you can explain. Give me an old truck that I could figure out how to work on. Those things, the older I get, the more I crave that simpler life. I know this sounds cliché as well, but the further we get into technology, the more important these things are.

BLOWOUT AND STYLE

UPDO’S BRAIDS WEDDINGS EVENTS + MORE

FOAM IMPROVEMENT: A Clean Kind of Bathroom Humor

Story by Beatrice Tolan

While You’re Washing Your Face, Japanese Artist Yuri Sugiura Is Forever Sculpting Bubbles

In front of Harajuku Station in Tokyo, Japan, a man dances on his hands and feet, his back arched like an animal, boombox blaring, wearing only a pair of shorts. Passersby are all keeping their distance, all but a young high schooler visiting the city for a sculpture program, Yuri Sugiura. An artist herself, she curiously approaches him. Their interaction will serve as a catalyst for Sugiura’s growing career as a sculptor. However, Sugiura works in no medium as pedestrian (or permanent) as clay or marble. No, Sugiura’s medium is suds.

Sugiura creates bubble busts on her own face using only facewash, carving away the suds to mimic eyebrows, creases, nostrils—anything to make a face expressive. Her skin shines through to create contrast and dimension. What began as selfies shared between friends has since evolved into “Face Wash Imitation,” an ongoing photo

Photos courtesy of Yuri Sugiura

project that has earned Sugiura more than 20 appearances on Japanese television and tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.

Sugiura remembers approaching that man in the diaper. “When I spoke to him,” she says now more than a decade later, “he replied, ‘This is not a performance, but a way of being.’ From that experience, I began to think how I want to be able to do what I am doing in art expression naturally in my daily life.”

Before bubbles, in 2014, Sugiura pursued a degree in oil painting at the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts outside of Nagoya, Japan. She’d spent the last few years as a caricature artist in a portrait shop and saw university as an opportunity to pursue painting and other forms of expression like performance art and videography. To ward off academic stress, Sugiura sought refuge in her bathtub.

“EVEN IF YOU THINK THAT PEOPLE ARE ‘DOING NOTHING,’ WE ARE UNCONSCIOUSLY CHANGING THE THINGS AROUND US IN OUR DAILY LIVES.”

– YURI SUGIURA

“The washroom is a place to reset, a place to be lost in thought,” says Sugiura.

She’s not the only person to feel that way. Winston Churchill was known to take baths sometimes twice a day, keeping calm and carrying on during the Blitz and ultimately defeating Hitler between soaks. Archimedes, meanwhile, will forever be remembered throughout history for his namesake water displacement principle discovered during a famous “eureka” moment while taking his own bath.

In a restful post-bath daze, Sugiura moved the loose

hairs stuck to the drained tub into detailed compositions. “The ruffles of the hair felt as smooth as drawing with a pencil,” she says. “From that time forward, I started recording and presenting works I created that extended out of daily activities.” Thus began the origins of her bathroom-based art.

Four years later, Sugiura was working as a comic book artist. After a particularly rough day of artist’s block, in the midst of her skincare routine, she caught something unexpected in the mirror. “The shape of my facewash made my eyes look upturned. When I washed my face the

VALUING ART BY ITS ABILITY TO STAND THE TEST OF TIME WOULD STRIP THE JOY IN BUILDING A SANDCASTLE, OR THE THRILL OF WRITING THE WORDS “WASH ME” ON THE BACK OF A DIRTY CAR.

next day, I saw my eyes downturned.” Each night after, Sugiura progressively added more detail to her facewash until she was caricaturing celebrities (Leo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet) from mere bubbles.

“‘Face Wash Imitation’ is a result of what I’ve experienced so far, learning sculpture and capturing human characteristics in my short time as a street caricaturist,” she says. Scrolling through her Instagram, her muses are immediately recognizable. Through high foam cheekbones and sudsy teeth, Freddie Mercury is brought back to life. Parodies range from Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker to Japanese comedians and athletes like Shohei Ohtani.

Sugiura sees her foam creations as a moment to find playfulness and joy in what we deem routine. Bathtime doesn’t have to just be a grooming chore; it can be a chance to enact change. One doesn’t need an art studio and “perfect conditions” for creative expression. “Even if you think that people are ‘doing nothing,’ we are unconsciously changing the things around us in our daily lives.”

Yet, everything she’s ever made in her bathroom explorations no longer exists. Like sand mandalas, all Sugiura’s creations exist only briefly before they take their journey back to the sea. But even on days when I feel I have done nothing else,” she says, “by creating something with

“THE BATHROOM IS A PLACE TO RESET, A PLACE TO BE LOST IN THOUGHT.”

– YURI SUGIURA

bubbles and washing it away, I can end the day as someone who has made something and I feel refreshed. Besides, valuing art by its ability to stand the test of time would strip the joy in building a sandcastle, or the thrill of writing the words “wash me” on the back of a dirty car.

Sugiura’s still exploring the potential for making art among the bath tiles, but she intends to find inspiration from other rooms in the future. New perspectives are everywhere. Artistic possibilities can be found in a fogged bathroom mirror, or a dirty dish in the sink. We can see what happens when we have the same open-minded curiosity Yuri Sugiura had for that man dancing at the Harajuku train station.

@SUGIURA.YURI.ART

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I PUT A SHELL ON YOU

By Bill Robens | Photos courtesy of Tess Morley

The Wisdom and Follies of Internationally-Recognized Shell Artist Tess Morley

When Sandro Botticelli set to work on his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, he knew he had to settle on some mode of transportation for his main subject. After all, it’s not really the “birth” of Venus, is it? The painting shows a fully-formed goddess at the beach greeted and clothed by local enthusiast, the Hora of Spring. This lady had to arrive in style, and only an enormous scallop shell would do.

It’s no accident that the Roman symbol of beauty would be associated with a scallop. She was born wholly formed in the sea, the source of all life, which sounds really beautiful until you remember she was only born because Saturn lopped off his dad’s manhood and tossed it into the sea. Those were different times. Regardless, the ocean’s association with birth, beauty, and sex has deep roots in western culture and throughout the world. For centuries, west African tribes have adorned masks and figures with cowrie shells symbolizing attributes like wealth and fertility. Oceanic cultures incorporate seashells into wedding attire for the same reasons.

Funny Valentines

n England, however, shells wouldn’t emerge as a decorative art until the age of exploration. “I think they brought them back as souvenirs,” says shell artist Tess Morley. “They’re a lovely thing, aren’t they?”

We’re discussing sailors’ valentines. I’d never heard of these before last week and they’re my new favorite thing. With British seapower stretching further and further across the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, sailors would collect shells from exotic locations as souvenirs. If they wanted something fancier,

A Tess Morley original sailor’s valentine.

they could purchase ornate, handcrafted valentines from local artisans in Barbados, often women. Made entirely out of seashells, these valentines were usually octagonal, composed of two glass-fronted boxes with a hinge in the center. Sometimes they would feature a message written in shells like “Forget Me Not” or “Think of Me.” How romantic is that? The answer is very.

“And they go for a lot of money now,” says Morley. “I restored one for an antiques dealer, and I thought, ‘Gosh, I really like this.’”

Morley’s enthusiasm for shell work was born out of a de-

sire to put her art degree to good use. “It’s quite easy to have a degree in art and not be able to make any money, or do anything,” says Morley, “but I’ve always made things and I always liked making things at home when I was little.”

That’s how you do it: Forge your own path with a degree that isn’t amenable to practical career choices. But why shells? “I had lots of shells and I didn’t know what to do with them, so I stuck them on a box and gave them to someone as a present. And then somebody else said, ‘Ooh, I really like those!’ And then really it just kind of went on from there.”

“Stuck them on a box” is not how anyone would describe Tess Morley’s catalogue of work. Beyond restoring sailors’ valentines, she’s since created her own spectacular creations.

At once charming and mesmerizing, the intricate swirls of brightly colored shells are never so daunting that they detract from the kindness and warmth of the medium. They’re far superior to the other famous 19th century valentines out there: a cupid, two dead birds, and a frog holding a pistol. You know, just normal symbols of affection.

Mosaics de la Mer

But shell art isn’t restricted to nautical themes. Morley’s body of work includes oyster shellframed mirrors, nautilus shell cups, and grotto-inspired lamps. Shells’ diversity in shape and color is readily adaptive to decorative arts and mosaic design.

The folks benefiting from the largesse of the expanding British Empire understood this. Treating the world as their personal Michaels, the Brits’ exposure to the four corners of the Earth brought access to an unprecedented variety of art supplies, especially shells. And when an English lord has time and acreage to fill, they’ll build a grotto, or a folly. And few follies are as fanciful as the one made entirely out of seashells: The Goodwood Shell House.

Naturally, Morley is the restorer of this fantastic (in the literary sense) 18th century folly. “It was quite near where I was living and it just happens to be the most sort of amazing one,” she says.

How does one even begin to restore a nearly 400-year-old building decorated every square inch (ahem, centimeter) with seashells? “You have to have the library of shells, really,” Morley says. “So, that’s really difficult. Sometimes you can’t find the same shells because some of

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Morley’s shell mosaic work inside a medieval manor house in East Sussex. The house is surrounded by a moat, accessible only by footbridge and the client wanted the room to have an “under the lake” theme.

“I try not to just get something and smother it all in shells, you know. I have to have a plan and find an angle.”

- Tess Morley

them become extinct.” Oh, that’s right. See: “Mankind’s impact upon the Earth.”

One thing that hasn’t become extinct is seafood restaurants, where Morley gets her scallops, oysters, winkles, and other kinds of shells. For rare shells—ethically-sourced, of course—there’s always the internet to ensure that even grand, densely-shelled palaces like Goodwood can have their broken, rare, and extinct adornments replaced with nearly identical alternatives that will elicit the requisite oohs and ahs expected of the local docent population.

The shell motif is as ancient and elemental in design

as figures in a cave painting. Humans throughout history relied on them to remind us of where we come from, where we’re going, and yes, because they’re pretty. They’re products of nature, but their application is nothing without a strategy.

“I definitely come at it from a fine art angle,” says Morley. If anyone knows how to synthesize shells with design, it’s her. “It’s really popular, this shell thing at the moment. I try not to just get something and smother it all in shells, you know. I have to have a plan and find an angle.” Like Botticelli had to have a plan for Venus. Give that woman a shell!

THE PINNACLE OF PEPPER HILL

356 WOODLEY ROAD MONTECITO, CA | OFFERED AT $29,500,000

Perched in the coveted enclave of Montecito’s Pepper Hill, this contemporary masterpiece unfolds across more than 2.5 acres on two parcels, offering an extraordinary opportunity for both seclusion and investment. Whether cherished as a private retreat or enhanced with one of the last buildable 1-acre lots in Montecito, the estate embodies rare flexibility and enduring value. From its serene setting, breathtaking panoramas sweep across the Pacific Ocean, the glittering coastline, and the majestic Santa Ynez Mountains, creating a truly unrivaled sanctuary.

Robert Kemp

SUSAN READ CRONIN BRONZE SCULPTURES

know a cat–an indoor cat–who, upon returning from a trip to the vet, possesses the uncanny ability to understand when she’s getting close to home. Surely she’s not familiar with local landmarks, nor is she curious enough of a cat to even look out the car window. But with a few corners still to turn, she’ll raise her tail, leap from the backseat, start sniffing around, and ready herself for the comforts of her cat bed. Does she smell something undetectable by humans? Is it a feline sixth sense? How can she possibly know she’s almost home?

Maybe you know a cat like this too, or maybe you’re a resident of Montecito and already understand this “almost-home” feeling, that feeling you get when you glide into Montecito proper and metal road signs from beyond give way to rustic, decidedly unmodern road sign panels of beautiful hand-carved wood.

Using wooden road signs is a neat little trick Montecito employs to make the village feel nicer than everywhere else, and guess what? It works. But these signs were not the result of whimsy. Montecito is a highly curated town and our long tradition of using wooden road signs are maintained with great zeal by the Montecito Community Foundation (MCF), responsible for other civic enhancements like the sprucing up of local bus stops and transforming a 76 gas station in the Upper Village into the Corner Green. One hundred years ago, civic leader Pearl Chase made it her life’s mission to transform Santa Barbara,

One of Paul Musgrove’s sign survey maps. (Courtesy of Montecito Community Foundation.)

post earthquake, into a place of beauty and seized upon that ruinous seismic reboot as an opportunity to rebuild the city in the Spanish Revival style of architecture. Not unlike Chase, the founding families of Montecito were determined to make their own special nook within an already special nook.

“Montecito was once a much smaller community and the movers and shakers were involved in everything,” says MCF trustee Chana Jackson. “They were involved in foundations all over town and they were very active in their community.”

It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time a few years prior to the big 1925 earthquake when Montecito didn’t have any street signs at all. Not having signs helped to maintain the community’s exclusivity, but there was a problem. “People wanted to get regular mail service from the city,” says Dr. Cynthia Withers, also a trustee with the Montecito Community Foundation. “The rural service was too slow and the only way they were going to get it was with road signs and mailing addresses.” Drats.

Fortunately, the Great Mailing Address Compromise of 1919 turned out instead to be more of a win-win. The wooden road signs, first carved by local firemen, would eventually become one of the many characterdefining traits made in accordance with the “Montecito

Community Plan” of 1980 (revised in 1992) codifying Montecito’s “semi-rural” spirit and aesthetic.

And while the MCF has been managing the road signs, the responsibility of crafting new signs and refurbishing existing ones has passed hands over the years. One notable former caretaker is Paul Musgrove, who retired in 2018 after 16 years of riding his fully-equipped Honda scooter up and down the streets of Montecito monitoring the signs’ health and protecting them from predators. Yes, predators. Termites found the signs delectable, so Musgrove innovated the idea of adding a protective acrylic veneer to keep the termites out. Other pests were local teenage hooligans whose age-appropriate humor turned the sign for High Road into a regular target for

The first of Clear Group’s new road signs. (Photo by Ivana Milenkovic.)

theft. But Musgrove wasn’t above taking the low road and booby-trapping the sign by filling it with an axle grease tinted blood red, eliciting harmless scares and guaranteed to ruin the upholstery of any thief’s getaway car.

As of March of 2025, sign crafting duties have been in the hands of Santa Barbara’s own Clear Group, a family of companies, whose main services include architecture, construction, millwork, and tradework. For them, it’s a novel but welcome responsibility.

“Our founder, Bailey Hochhalter, got his start as a finish carpenter,” says Justin Klosinski, Clear’s director of sales. “He did a bunch of handcarved signs for a Goleta ranch when he was coming up. So when this came to him, he was pretty excited about it. “

At Clear’s millwork studio in Ventura, repairs are still done by hand, but new signs are built with the help of precision machines that nevertheless preserve the signs’ quaint qualities. Being bespoke, the Montecito signs’

lettering once varied slightly from sign to sign, but the new mechanical construction means that new Montecito signs going forward will have an official standardized font: Three cheers for !

“We’ve done similar restoration projects like this where we used the same machine to carve out an amazing wood tile ceiling that looks authentic for another era,” says Klosinski. “So, we have experience working with modern tools to create a certain aesthetic.”

Montecito’s certain aesthetic is a big part of the draw. It’s what makes the whole neighborhood feel like home, for humans and cats alike.

“I think the signs preserve a feeling of community, simplicity, and artistic sense,” says Withers. “They’re original. You don’t see them anywhere else. They’re safe. It’s just a rural charm.”

Photo by Ivana Milenkovic

photo: WAYNE M C CAL

photos: jason rick

The chaise looks perfectly natural and like it’s always been there, which is kind of the point. You’d never know it’s the first of its kind. In fact, if you search "pool covering chaise," or "solar pool cover reel enclosure," you know what comes up? Squat.

A Case Study: You, Too, Can DIY Something That’s Never Been Done

by Les Firestein

In This Case a Pool Cover… Cover (In the Shape of a Chaise)

I have built things and been a writer for basically my entire life. In my early days I did carpentry to support my habit of writing. Now, after decades of writing, I still build stuff to support my expensive habit of… living in Montecito.

Acommon misconception about today’s Montecito is that everyone here is retired and a billionaire. But it’s simply not true. Some Montecitans are only semi-retired and mere millionaires. Look I’m not saying Meghan Markle is rolling up her sleeves like Joe Lunchpale, but girlfriend is up here doing what? Working. Because she lives in a place with the highest state tax and high property tax and where a basic burrito can set you back 20 bucks. In Montecito, the “street” from “street tacos” seems to be Wall Street.

My point is Montecito may be overrepresented on the Forbes 400 and there’s a bunch of us driving electric not just because it’s “right,” but because it’s simply cheaper. Such is the case with my friends Susan and John.

“A Great Perch From Which To Watch the End of the World”

usan and John began their sojourn to California residency by visiting me and my wife here in Montecito. Like every other visitor, after a few days they faced the prospect of returning home and had to ask themselves the inevitable question… returning why? As these things go, on their next trip out Susan and John asked if we could recommend a broker so they could see what, if anything, they could afford here as a second home.

It turned out Susan and John’s Montecito starter home would actually be Montecito adjacent, in Summerland. It was a modest place twenty feet from what is technically Montecito, with a nice enough HOA, haimish neighbors (read: non billionaires), and a great view of

Stucco can last 10,000 years like these guys from the Ain Ghazal archaeological site in Jordan, so we figured it was a good choice of material.

the Pacific—albeit on a promontory above a trailer park. Mind you I’m not dissing the trailer park. It’s where I’d be if I were in a trailer park and whoever owns it had the prescience to site it with great access to the 101 right before Summerland blew up with the likes of Field + Fort, Red Kettle Coffee, and of course, Godmothers bookstore.

Susan, John, and myself renovated the heck out of that “little” Summerland abode (renovations are my side hustle) and we really turned it into a Fabergé egg. But when Covid struck and family retrenched, Suze and John were busting out of the place. This precipitated their next inevitable question: if SB is where they were going to live out their possible final days hoarding toilet paper and socially distancing, shouldn’t they have a bigger and better bunker from which to do so? Their searching quickly yielded a "Montecito fixer," so my friends were able to upgrade to a larger home in 93108, albeit one with some very real aesthetic challenges.

“Our little experiment had little chance of looking worse than the existing structure which had the appearance of a plank from a pirate ship at the abandoned Disney Chernobyl.”

What the Heck is a Montecito Fixer Anyway?

The new place was a fixer by Montecito standards but still pretty much a mansion anywhere else. The site is the kind of place my friend Michael Weithorn calls the proverbial “Great Perch From Which To Watch the End of the World.” The acreage looks like the Garden of Eden enhanced by A.I. with an unlimited floral budget, where every evening the sunsets look like God made us a new screen saver.

This exhibition is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art Generous

Broccoli Charitable

Manitou Fund Nora McNeely Hurley and Michael Hurley; and SBMA Ambassadors.

Top: Claude Monet,

That being said, when my friends toured me through their narco deco manse and asked if the place could be more attractive, it reminded me of that scene in The Godfather when Don Corleone brings the bullet-riddled body of Sonny to the undertaker. “I don’t want his mother to see him this way.”

Regardless, the bones of the new place were good (whatever that means—homes aren’t made from bones—hopefully) and on a clear day you could look out over the ocean and watch your Amazon shipments

meander in from China.

Pool Your Resources: The holy trinity that brought our #chaisegoals to life: (clockwise from top) Candelario Vital, engineer Ken Dickson, and “Concrete Tyler” Ley.

Ken Dickson: Windwardeng.com Tyler Ley: Tylerley.com

On the minus side of the ledger, the previous interior designer, if there was one, was definitely partial to colors not found in nature. It’s quite possible that the architect was the set decorator from Love Island .

The impact of this was we’d be making surface changes to, well, everything. And there were some architectural details that needed massaging… like with a jackhammer. Nevertheless, there were really only two aesthetic crimes against humanity that required immediate attention.

Was There an Epstein Island Estate Sale

I’d Somehow Missed?

There was a bizarre collection of huge poolside columns that looked like they’d been designed by the Wolf of Wall Street, perhaps for the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Fortunately this problem was easily resolved with jackhammers, a dumpster, and a lot of Red Bull.

The larger issue was la piscine had an above ground pool cover not really hiding in a cartoonishly long box that also housed a very nice rodent family, and looked like it was conceived in Spicoli’s shop class. The pool cover box was trying to “disguise” itself as a bench but it looked as much like a bench as I do. There was no getting around it (literally there was no way of navigating around it) the only solution to hiding the pool roller was to somehow get it below ground. That is until some Montecito pool guys came in with their bids to do so.

Never Trust a Contractor

With an Audemars Piguet

Susan did a spit take when I showed her the multiple bids to bury the pool roller at $100K+ which was well on the way to the price of a new pool. So that was a non-starter. And if you’re wondering why Susan didn’t just get a nicer enclosure for her pool cover, the answer is because there is no such thing. It’s like saying you should get a nicer goiter.

Sadly, there are really only two ways to deal with the innate hideosity of pool cover rollers. Either they’re designed into the ground from the jump, which in this case would require a very expensive time machine, or it sits in a box and looks like something for storing heavy artillery.

You Need To Think Outside the (Pool Roller Cover) Box

One of the reasons my friends hired me and not one of Santa Barbara’s many great construction firms is while I may not personally be Stradivarius with a skillsaw, I can certainly find you someone who is and can juice a search engine like a chop shop with an actual engine.

During Susan’s escrow, I saw a really wide and pretty poolside chaise at the Colony Palms Hotel in Palm Springs which naturally got me thinking: might it be

feasible to create a chaise that straddled the entire pool while simultaneously (and covertly!) hiding their hideous pool cover? Could we fabricate a pool cover roller concealing… chaise? And, if so, could it actually not just be functional, but maybe legitimately nice?

The location where the pool cover-concealing chaise would be was actually sort of ideal with an incredible view, pool proximity, and bathed in the sun all day. And how cool would it be to have this chaise at the end of your pool where you press a button and, James Bond-like, out rolls the pool cover? The pool chaise plan was a go. So how did we do it?

Step 1. Run it by an engineer.

ne of the reasons I’ve worked with Ken Dickson of Windward Engineering for so long is he’s local, so he really knows his way around building code. Also, Ken looks for creative solutions to make things work rather than reasons they can’t. For engineers the question is always “does it calc out” and if it doesn’t, can “it” be redesigned, or use different materials so that it does?

Ken and I agreed our pool chaise would need to be made from stucco given the constant punishment from the sun and salty sea air. Stucco, for the uninitiated, is one of the oldest things ever created by primates. It is not only pre-historic, but from an era classified as “pre-pottery.” The oldest stucco on Earth has lasted 9,000 years, so I knew if done right it would get me past the timeline of liability.

Another critical component Ken identified was that our chaise would need to be supported by a steel beam in order to be able to support itself over such a long span of the entire pool. And it needed something called a “thermal break” to avoid cracks when the two materials react differently to temperature changes. That’s definitely not something I would have thought of.

Another reason you want to engage an engineer on your bespoke project is they think holistically about how to make your prototype robust, i.e. trying to anticipate everything this massive pool chaise needs to “do.” It needs to not block existing drainage and needs to shed water. You need to account for how the whole thing is going to deal with ambient moisture. It needs to not house rodents. Ken’s job is to consider all these naturally occurring phenomena that will come into play as well as the assumption that teens will party on it, boys will ride bikes off it, and eventually a person or persons will have sex on it. Ken then gives you a materials list so you can budget, and the fact that he himself was a contractor for 14 years certainly accelerates the whole process.

Step 2.

Devise a budget.

There’s an old adage in the building business: “Anything can be done, it’s just a matter of money and time.” What I told my friends Susan and John turned out to be true: if we threw money at this pool chaise they’d be in it for less than $25K, and our little experiment had little chance of looking worse than the existing structure which had the appearance of a plank from a pirate ship at the abandoned Disney Chernobyl.

Step 3. Prototype.

Now all we had to do was build our forms (molds) into which the cement could be poured and make sure the dimensions were to our liking. Keeping in mind that proportions are important. We didn’t want to go through all this to create another inadvertent prop from a JLo halftime show.

For this task I often go to a gentleman named Candelario “Condi” Vitale, who came to me through the at-the-timeshuttered Biltmore by way of my then-neighbor Gail Steinbeck. Condi is smart. Talented. Collaborative. Up for a challenge. I think he’s also O.C.D., but that penchant for detail has been to our great advantage.

With obsessive compulsive focus, Condi created all our concrete forms. He sweated the seating angles. Each time field testing with the end users (pun intended). And Condi also obsessed over what architects call “circulation” (the way humans interact with an object or space).

Step 4.

Get to the guru.

F

orms built, we were just about ready to fill our forms with cement. But before we poured there was one thing left we needed to do. We needed to make sure our prototype was the absolute best version of itself. The project required a feeling of permanence rather than improvisation. We needed the blessing of a guru. Enter YouTube’s “Concrete Tyler.”

As I said at the beginning, I may not be an expert in certain matters of construction, but I can find you an expert who is. Case in point Tyler Ley, AKA “Concrete Tyler,” a highly entertaining PhD, structural and materials engineer, and professor at Oklahoma State University with with many patents and awards and millions of YouTube views to his credit.

I think I originally found Tyler by Googling “world’s foremost expert on concrete.” I then reached out to him through social media, and asked if I could pay him to consult, or at least make a contribution to his class in exchange for a video consult. Long story short, Tyler walked through the project with us on FaceTime, and through his connections, he even got Owens Corning to send us fiberglass rebar for our project which is stronger than steel and doesn’t corrode. Shout out to Casey Ingle at Owens Corning for the FRP rebar! Then again on the day of the big pour Tyler was there with us making sure we had the right concrete mix (he invented something called the “Tarantula Curve” for optimal concrete mixing), making sure we vibrated the concrete after the pour to remove any air pockets and to densify our mix.

Step 5.

Finishing touches and enjoy!

So much can go wrong in construction that I definitely cherish when everything goes right. But our success with the pool chaise was no fluke. It was engineered to be successful. A wave washes over me—of satisfaction. That you can think something up. Have it engineered. Thanks to the internet, have it backstopped and signed off on by the world’s most relevant expert. I’m also grateful for the skilled laborers who, like me, took pride in doing something novel and having a hand in its novel

success. Our project certainly concretized (pun intended again) a great collaboration, and, in the process, created a space where many others will enjoy many other perfect moments going forward.

Chaise Nous

Today we’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of Susan and John’s pool chaise pour. Our chaise has been robust. It has been problem-free, it has been maintenance-free and durable. It’s where I will go in the event of a nuclear attack.

“IT’S A GREAT PERCH FROM WHICH TO WATCH THE END OF THE WORLD.”

“A common misconception about today’s Montecito is that everyone here is retired and a billionaire. But it’s simply not true. Some Montecitans are only semi-retired and mere millionaires.”

MANINI BY THE SEA

BY JOE DONNELLY

Courtesy of Daniella Manini

DANIELLA MANINI’S SPECTRUM OF MAGICAL SPACES

Daniella Manini, a Ventura-based multi-hyphenate artist, grew up in the Miraflores District of Lima, Peru, a charmed perch just south of the city proper set dramatically on a steep bluff above the Pacific Ocean. Picture the Mesa in Santa Barbara, if the Mesa was also a vibrant cultural hotspot built around an ancient adobe pyramid predating the Incan Empire. For residents of Miraflores, as with those of the Mesa, the sea beckons from hundreds of feet below the bluff, infusing the atmosphere with its salt air and siren call, providing the axis around which life revolves. Manini was no exception. “It’s not on the sand—it’s on a cliff—but the ocean was always around. My mom and grandmother were beach people, so we went often. Even in the winter the view was there,” says Manini. “The ocean was always part of me.” Her abiding connection to the ocean is apparent to anyone who comes across her art in its many manifestations—be it found on sun-stoked sandals for Reef, or in magically realistic seascapes on a can of June Shine, and especially in a series of endlessly summery prints starring your favorite coastal destinations. In all its shapes and forms, Manini’s art communicates a spellbound relationship to the sand, stars, and sea creatures that feels as urgent and playful as love.

A Shore Thing: Beaches by Manini.

“I grew up around paper, around color, hand-me-down books, so it was really appealing to me at a young age,” says Manini.

One could say Manini is in a long-term relationship with her roots even though she left home two decades ago, restless and ready to broaden her horizons. “I was a 25- or 26-year-old woman who didn’t really think she was getting anywhere and I had some close friends who recently moved to Solana Beach in San Diego and they were like, ‘You’re going to love it here. You should come here.’”

She quit her job, sold her car, broke the news to her

parents, and moved to California. “It was a very impulsive decision,” she laughs. “And, actually, when I landed in San Diego, I loved it.”

Manini is sitting astride a painting easel in her downtown Ventura studio as she relates this anecdote. It’s late summer and she has a rare day off. Soft light illuminates exposed wood beams above her and a wall full of paintings behind, some complete, some in progress, but all bearing her distinctive take on beach destinations.

Photo by Stephanie Helguera

Before she lit out for San Diego, Manini, an admittedly indifferent student, had barely managed to graduate college with a degree in advertising. Her parents talked her into finishing school, but it was an introductory graphic design class that saved the day. “They showed us Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and to me that was the most amazing thing ever,” she says. “That’s what kept me going.”

College may have introduced her to digital tools, but Manini had already developed an appreciation for traditional mediums, thanks in part to her father’s job representing a paper mill.

“I grew up around paper, around color, handme-down books, so it was really appealing to me at a young age,” says Manini. “I did a lot of markers, fine-point markers. And then pastel, soft pastel and a little bit of watercolor. Then, digital media became my interest when I started learning Photoshop and Illustrator. Technology found me.”

Though enthused with San Diego, Manini’s transition to the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t seamless. Struggling to find work as a graphic artist, she found herself working odd jobs to stay afloat—walking dogs, babysitting, working at a coffee shop.

“The system was eating me up,” she recalls. “I kept looking for jobs and making illustrations and building up more portfolio work.”

Manini was living in Del Mar when she came across a job posting on Craigslist for an unnamed company in Carlsbad that was looking for a graphic designer. On the strength of her portfolio, she got an interview and landed the job. It turned out to be with legendary surf photographer Aaron Chang. With one of San Diego’s favorite sons helping her unlock the keys to the city, Manini’s career started to gain traction.

Another big break came when Billabong hired Manini in 2008, but it arrived with some caveats: after years of dizzying growth in the aughts, the surf industry was starting a precipitous decline along with the rest of the economy. “I was the only designer there that did the graphics, so it was a lot of work,” says Manini. “I had to wear many hats and make the designs look like we had maybe five designers. I had to learn how to make different styles.”

“It’s

the light and the semi-tropical weather that I feel inspired by,” says Manini.

Courtesy of Daniella Manini

Photo by Stephanie Helguera

Today, Manini is still wearing many hats. She’s a wife, a mother of two (who have a table at the studio ready with crayons, markers, and watercolors when the muse calls) lead textile designer for Patagonia, graphic artist for some of your favorite sun-splashed brands, and the proprietor of her own print shop: Yes, Sea Studio.

Yes, Sea Studios is where Manini makes her signature renderings of treasured coastal destinations, a series that started out as something she did for herself.

The inspiration hit after she and her husband moved to Ventura, where he started working at Patagonia. Manini wanted to bring a piece of her former life in San Diego

to her new home. So, she painted a highly stylized, yet deceptively simple, graphic landscape of Beacon’s Beach in Encinitas.

“I wasn’t trying to sell it,” says Manini. “I was just making something for myself, to put together that feeling that I had for that space, because that was the beach that I used to go to when I lived there.”

That initial inspiration led to a few more and when she showed the work, demand was immediate. In 2014, she opened Yes, Sea Studio, using quality paper and mostly in-house printing for fulfillment.

Beachscapes are common fodder for art, but there’s something special about Manini’s perspective. The icon-

Manini agrees: Santa Barbara’s beach scene is worthy of artistic commemoration.

ic settings—ranging from coast to coast—read like an alchemic merging of the artist’s playful affection and the place’s romantic essence. They’re visual haiku, capturing the whole vibe in a few deft strokes.

No surprise, Santa Barbara, represented in depictions of Miramar, Hammond’s, Hendry’s, Butterfly Beach (at its most beguiling), and others, occupies an outsize share of the artist’s imagination.

“It’s really the entire area that I’m drawn to,” says Manini. “Santa Barbara is a magical place and I’m mostly drawn to its history. It’s the light and the semi-tropical weather that I feel inspired by.”

“MY MOM AND GRANDMOTHER WERE BEACH PEOPLE, SO WE WENT OFTEN. EVEN IN THE WINTER THE VIEW WAS THERE,” SAYS MANINI. “THE OCEAN WAS ALWAYS PART OF ME.”

When asked if she was deliberately idealizing these destinations, perhaps to remind us of what’s worth preserving, Manini demurred. “Honestly, I don’t think it’s intentional. I think that’s the way I see it… that’s how I experienced it.”

Even better.

The way she sees it benefits from the lineage she carries to the canvas. Her lines are informed by her experience growing up in Peru, working with the colors and traditions of her formative years. The images in her art are as much characters in a story as they are symbols of a place.

“Peru is very iconographic. There are stories of culture everywhere. Even shells have been part of my inspiration since I was very young, and that also reflects pre-Columbian cultures, which used shells in drawings and textiles. That heritage doesn’t disconnect from me, ever.”

So, what does Manini see when she sees a shell?

“I find them to be representations of the infinite,” she says. “The fact that they carry the sound of the sea, and the patterns they make. I think they are treasures and jewels of the ocean.”

She didn’t always see it like this. For many years, she was just a kid who lived near the beach, taking things for granted. One day, when she was 18 or 19, Manini says, something changed as she stood near the water with “the sun shining at a specific time of day with the water sparkling at a certain time of day.”

She looked down at the water around her feet and suddenly felt like she stepped into “this spectrum of magical space” and she knew she always wanted to be by the sea. “I had no idea my life was going to unfold around that specific zapping discovery,” she says, “but it was always around me.”

That might be as good a way to think of the feeling her art evokes. The viewer is invited to be zapped—by beauty, by hope, by the best way we can see.

Courtesy of Daniella Manini

HOLLYWOOD VAULTS... INTO THE FUTURE OF HIGH SECURITY STORAGE

(And Santa Barbara Is Not Far Behind)

It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but sleeker and more secure.

by Les Firestein

Afew Rivs ago I wrote a piece about the horrors of household storage.

My premise was that offsite storage is intrinsically horrible and that the best strategy is to store nothing. I don’t really care how well you’ve Marie Kondo’d your stuff. That just means you have really organized horrible storage. Which in certain ways is worse because of the additional investments of time, thought, energy, and trips to The Container Store.

Part of the reason I fundamentally oppose storage is that storage facilities by their very nature (and business model) are generally bad buildings in bad, out of the way places and sometimes dicey neighborhoods. As a result you avoid your storage like an ex. Over time your stuff deteriorates. And for 89% of people that’s how storage works: your bank account decays along with the contents of your personal Planet Hollywood, a Planet Hollywood that’s out by the freeway and never gets visited. Your stuff becomes a time capsule that no one is interested in excavating, least of all you.

To be fair, maybe another 10% of people store their stuff at home. This, too, can go horribly awry for a whole different raft of reasons. Your home storage is not robust. The environment is not controlled and the system is not backed up or failsafed. If your home is anything like mine, packed with dogs and people with varying degrees of ADHD, your abode is in pretty much a constant state of chaos and entropy. These are less than optimal conditions for storing the Magna Carta, or that very rare $7.25 million Honus Wagner baseball card your grandfather left you. If your grandfather was Honus Wagner.

WHERE TO STORE THE $2 MILLION SNEAKERS WORN BY JORDAN TO WIN HIS LAST NBA FINALS

So what do the storage elite do? That 1% of people who actually need to preserve their valuables who are legitimately archiving. I’m talking about the rock stars, sports stars, art stars, costume aficionadi and sports memorabilia nuts. Imagine a houseguest who borrows your Nikes for a pickup game in your driveway not knowing those kicks were worn by Michael Jordan to win his final NBA championship against the Utah Jazz in 1998. Those are $2 million sneakers. And that’s probably not a houseguest you’d invite back.

YOU IMMEDIATELY GET THE SENSE YOU’RE IN A PRIVATE MUSEUM FEATURING THE LUMINARIES OF AMERICAN CULTURE—A MADAME TUSSAUDS, BUT WITH JUST THE EPHEMERA AND NONE OF THE CREEPY WAX FIGURES.

805.682.2226 | projectsgc.com | license #884424

Does your storage unit look like this? My house doesn’t even look this nice.

STORAGE SHOULD BE LEFT TO THE PROS. AND THERE’S NO PLACE MORE PRO THAN HOLLYWOOD

VAULTS.

f you truly have stuff worth preserving and you truly need to preserve it, the apex of secure storage is probably Hollywood Vaults. Where founder-proprietor David Wexler has been quietly elevating the high-end storage arts and sciences for more than 40 years.

Top-notch, highly secure storage is a business David Wexler not only invented, but perfected. His origin story is pretty interesting too. Wexler’s dad made a career shooting films that were used in classrooms, predating the existence of YouTube by maybe 50 years. You may not know this, but not only is the film business a highly un-

stable business filled with highly unstable people, but film itself is highly unstable and degrades at a fairly alarming rate. Something like half the commercial film shot before 1950 is gone, including the original Great Gatsby from 1926, along with important works by Alfred Hitchcock, Lon Chaney, Erich von Stroheim, and Orson Welles, to name just a few.

At a certain point the Wexlers needed a place to store their film archive, but found that temperature-controlled storage was in high demand and exclusive. At one point David called around for storage only to be told by one facility they had nothing available and a long waitlist which was closed. And whereas you or I, in Wexler’s position, might find this to be a bummer, Wexler saw a very

obvious business opportunity. The rest is film storage history. Wexler recently invited me for a visit to his enterprise. I knew Hollywood Vaults looked sleek from their ads, but what would it be like IRL?

IRL HOLLYWOOD VAULTS LOOKS LIKE THE VILLAIN’S LAIR SOMEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

First of all, much to Wexler’s good fortune, a very desirable neighborhood has sprouted up around his storage facility including eateries like Katsuya and Tao and now this hood even has its own Tre Lune (shout out to Montecito’s Gene Montesano for that). So already I’m having a better time at storage than at my old unit down by the train tracks in Long Beach.

The drive down to Hollywood Vaults feels like you’ve pulled on to a futuristic movie set, which I would describe as “aggressively nondescript ominous-brutalist” meets Halliburton. Even the Hollywood Vaults logo looks like Cyberdyne-Skynet (from Terminator) cross-bred with the Tyrell Corporation (from Blade Runner). This is not your average U-store by the freeway.

Entering the facility is of course a cinch for clients, but not for me because various redundant systems have identified me as an interloper. Due to an NDA I’m not saying there was a red laser tracking my forehead, but I also can’t say that there wasn’t. In any event I eventually hear the magic words, “Access Granted,” in the vaguely British accent Madonna uses when she’s trying to sound smart and then a lot of things happen that one ordinarily associates with movies directed by James Cameron. In a world where so little lives up to the hype, Hollywood Vaults is one of the few places that exceeds expectations.

I EVENTUALLY

HEAR

THE MAGIC WORDS, “ACCESS GRANTED,” IN THE VAGUELY BRITISH ACCENT MADONNA USES WHEN SHE’S TRYING TO SOUND SMART. AND THEN A LOT OF THINGS HAPPEN THAT ONE ORDINARILY ASSOCIATES WITH MOVIES DIRECTED BY JAMES CAMERON.

PUTTING THE COLD IN COLD STORAGE

The first things one notices at Hollywood Vaults are the cool temperature and low humidity. On this particular day it’s more than 100 degrees outside, but a constant 45 degrees inside and Wexler hands me a Hollywood Vaults puffer coat because he knows I’ve spent too much time in Montecito and Wexler correctly guesses I can no longer tolerate weather extremes. The Hollywood Vaults puffer is cool both literally and as a figure of speech.

This being an NDA situation, I can’t tell you exactly what I saw inside the facility. But I did catch a few glimpses inside some units as archivists were carting priceless assets in and out. You immediately get the sense you’re in a private museum featuring the luminaries of American culture, a Madame Tussauds, but with just the ephemera and none of the wax figures.

Elsewhere in this issue, I talk about an outdoor chaise I built under which would be a good place to duck and cover during the Apocalypse. Another great place to wait out the End of Days is Hollywood Vaults, especially if Armageddon involves a chemical or biological agent.

Vaults are customizable for each client.

A SANCTUARY FOR PRESERVATION

When it comes to purity and decontamination, David Wexler never met a cutting edge technology he didn’t like. Hollywood Vaults feels like a Center for Disease Control, only more fun.

First off there’s a quarantine area, where your prized possessions get very thoroughly decontaminated. There are redundant air filters throughout the building whereby the internal atmosphere is constantly being measured for contaminants and other undesirables. There are, of course, waterless fire suppressants. And a fancy device that's 100X more sensitive than your home smoke detector called the VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) from Australia. The VESDA provides anticipatory detection at Hollywood Vaults and is to smoke and fire what Minority Report “precrime” is to crime. The VESDA detects the components of smoke in their microscopic infancy and basically tells combustion, “Don’t even think about becoming a fire.”

Is all of this a little excessive? I’ll put it this way. That Honus Wagner baseball card in good condition can fetch north of $7 million. Recently a storage facility caught fire where one such Honus Wagner card melted into its collectible “legacy” protective case. You can buy that card right now on eBay—they’re asking $150,000.

Founder-proprietor

David Wexler, a 50year Santa Barbara resident, has been quietly elevating the high-end storage arts and sciences for more than 40 years.

This old film vault was probably the most lung cancer-ey place we’ve seen so far. (Photo from www.reddit.com/r/ urbanexploration)

A HOLLYWOOD VAULTS-TYPE FACILITY IS COMING TO SANTA BARBARA: CANON VAULTS

In case you don’t feel like driving into Hollywood, here in Santa Barbara, David Wexler is consulting on a project that plans to rent highly secure storage to Santa Barbarans in the very near future. If anything, Canon Vaults is even more exclusive than Hollywood Vaults with the addition of private lounge areas and event spaces. So yes I got a tour, and, though downtown, Canon Vaults has some of the best views of Santa Barbara and definitely room for a helipad on the roof. But will there be one? I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Recovered from the ashes of California’s 2016 Clayton fire, this 1909 T206 Honus Wagner tobacco card shows severe surface and corner damage from the blaze. Now it’s worth just a fraction of its original $7 million evaluation. (Photo by eBay seller krakerzak707)

Telephone Building in Santa Barbara, future home of Canon Vaults. (Photo by Bill Dewey)

WING

JEFF

THE 1925 DISASTER AND SANTA BARBARA’S CONTROLLED METAMORPHOSIS BY

BIRTH

SANTA BARBARA, CA, June 29, 1925, 6:44am — One June morning about a century ago, all hell broke loose in a small seaside vacation spot unaccustomed to hell breaking loose. The whole seismic beatdown would last a scant 19 seconds, but that explosive interval would be sufficient to launch a municipal transfiguration in perpetuity. Santa Barbara’s utterly demolished central corridor would be the smashed chrysalis from which the town would re-emerge as a shining, marketable homage to an idealized earlier epoch. It would be a Spanish Colonial Revival, you might say.

A close-knit coterie of urban activists in Santa Barbara had long pined for the means to make the city over in this new image, a tough sell in the Victorian-era western town. Santa Barbara’s reinvention would necessitate a civic extinction event. It arrived with a bang.

WRECKING BALL

n the wee hours of June 29, 1925, a tectonic fistfight broke out some four miles beneath the Santa Barbara Channel’s seabed, the subterranean tussle releasing a brief squall of energy equal to the ignition of 19,000 tons of TNT. The architectural moment and the town’s otherwise enviable geologic posture intersected that day to optimize a bout of destruction.

By 1925, Santa Barbara had, for some years,

enjoyed a growing reputation among the traveling elite—those who could pick up and flee the seasonally insufferable climes of their eastern and Midwest homesteads. The small California town was scattered like a flung fistful of diamonds across the graded plain between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the glittering Pacific. This tilted coastal plain—called a piedmont—is geologically defined as a gently sloping transition from foothills down to flatter terrain. For

QUAKE

eons, this sloped Santa Barbara plain had borne running water from mountains to sea and was now comprised of an earthen substrate as loamy and loosely-packed as that of a riverbed. This alluvial soil is nutrient-dense and will grow just about anything.

In an earthquake, the stuff amplifies a seismic wave like an overexcited semi-solid.

Santa Barbara’s downtown, then built largely of brittle, unreinforced masonry, would not absorb any part of the amplified earthquake’s energy but would lavishly yield to it. Once the lateral shaking ensued at 6:44 that morning, previously majestic-looking commercial buildings sloppily dissolved into piles of rubble, or were bisected as neatly as dollhouses.

Photo courtesy of the Edson Smith Photo Collection, Santa Barbara Public Library.

The Hotel Californian came apart like week-old marzipan, the El Camino Real Hotel looked like a gigantic boot had crushed it, the San Marcos Building seemed to have been struck by a missile. The grand Arlington Hotel, Santa Barbara’s Jewel in the Hospitality Crown, saw a rooftop water tank dislodge and plow downward through successive executive suites of the tower that supported it—a liberated wrecking ball. Killed instantly was Bertram Hancock, the only son of oilman, philanthropist, and Allan Hancock College’s namesake. His father had installed Bertram in the tower’s luxury suite to give him a taste of his life to come. Bertram had just graduated from college and was excitedly preparing to enter his father’s business domain. Eighty-two-year-old Edith Forbes Perkins was also killed in the accident.

In all, 13 people were killed in Santa Barbara’s 1925 earthquake, a tragic but arguably smallish death toll belied by the town’s obliterated 14-block-long central corridor. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a determined group of civic activists would seize the “blank slate” opportunity to enact a vision that had been simmering for quite some time.

Photo courtesy of the Edson Smith

Photo Collection, Santa Barbara Public Library.

BERNHARD AND PEARL AND ARCHITECTURAL CONTROL

The familiar historical narrative describes a neatly seismic delineation—old Santa Barbara is leveled by the 1925 earthquake and remade as a Spanish Mediterranean oasis of sun-washed adobe and red tile. In fact, the transition was somewhat marked by alarm, fear of overreach, lots of accusatory hollering, and an ominous term whose emergence has been traced to Santa Barbara’s uniquely

troubled metamorphosis: “Architectural Control.” After the quake, Santa Barbara became the first city in the country to adopt a city ordinance establishing mandatory municipal architectural control. Local architectural review has been burnishing and curating the city ever since.

In 1921, a wealthy Santa Barbara arriviste from Massachusetts named Bernhard Hoffmann bought Casa de la Guerra, hiring James Osborne Craig to build a pedestrian shopping experience around it.

Courtesy of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

Hoffmann envisioned a sort of miniature “city of Spain.” There would be a courtyard, a patio, restaurants, and a decorative alleyway. Oh, and a fountain. Hoffmann’s larger idea was to establish Santa Barbara as a “New Spain in America,” and El Paseo was his proof of concept.

A local dynamo and soulmate in urban overhaul, Pearl Chase joined forces with Hoffmann. In February 1922, a Plans and Planting Division was formed to promote the beautification of Santa Barbara. Hoffmann was made chairman and Chase was secretary. The Plans section then formed an Architectural Advisory Committee for promoting Spanish Colonial Revival as Santa Barbara’s once and future template. In 1923, ordinance 1169 established a City Planning Commission. Hoffmann was made secretary.

Some two years later, on June 29, Santa Barbara’s calamitous earthquake struck and in its confused wake an “emergency engineering committee” was convened on July 3. Business owners desperate to get their smashed buildings rebuilt were politely straightarmed by the city’s new keepers. “No major program of reconstruction should be undertaken without first being considered by a group which should consist of: (a) architects of Santa Barbara, (b) City Planning Commission, (c) a group of representative businessmen and property owners.”

The Architectural Board of Review’s emergent and binding “recommendations” immediately polarized the community. On August 7, 1925, a churlish property owner named Howard Sweeney announced his candidacy for municipal election. His platform? An eloquent rant against the “selfish greed, thirst for power, and the disregard of citizenship and property rights” embodied in the new arrangements. A guy named Henry Adrian was elected mayor instead, and would stun everyone by abolishing the Architectural Board of Review.

Bernhard Hoffmann, furious at the abolition of the Board, left in a huff. Pearl Chase then became chairman of the Plans and Planting Division, the Board of Review’s progenitor. She led it until her passing in 1979.

On January 9, 1947, the Santa Barbara City Council adopted Ordinance 2121, quietly raising from the dead the Architectural Board of Review. On August 4, 1958, the Board adopted “Policy for Architectural Control,” prescribing choices of materials, signs, colors, and a myriad of other details—designating as well which areas and structures in town were (are) of historic importance.

URBAN RENEWAL AND INDIVIDUAL HEARTACHE

Committees loudly convene, rules are made, rebar braces concrete, architectural trends wax and wane. Santa Barbara is today bustling and red-tiled and as famous as it is beautiful; a global oasis birthed by cataclysm.

One tormented gentleman spent his life wounded by the natural disaster that launched the town’s transformation.

Following the earthquake he would continue his established record of success, however muted his later enthusiasms. G. Allan Hancock would pass away in 1965.

For 40 years the gentleman bore a speech impediment whose appearance dated to that balmy June morning when he arguably lost everything he had of value. “In that frightful moment when the walls fell out and I was hurled through space,” Hancock somberly confided to a friend in his autumn years, “I caught a vivid, never-to-be-forgotten glimpse. It was my son’s bed—plunging downward in the roaring mass.”

Courtesy of Neal Graffy

...ask an expert

Big ideas deserve the right partners—the ones who know how to turn a spark of inspiration into something lasting. That’s the spirit of Ask an Expert. In these pages, we introduce the professionals who shape the way we live, inside and out. From vision-setting designers and meticulous builders to the craftspeople, service providers, and lifestyle leaders who help us sustain it all, these experts bring clarity to complex decisions and confidence to every step of the process. Each profile gives you a peek behind the curtain—who these experts are, what they do best, and how they think. Then we put them on the spot with quick questions that stimulate honest, useful answers. The payoff? Insider tips, fresh perspective, and a little wisdom you can actually use. Together, these voices form a trusted guide to living well, building smart, and creating spaces that truly last.

198.

Design

HAYLEY BRIDGES DESIGN

BUENA TILE + STONE

HOUSE RUPERT

AB DESIGN GROUP

CLEAR GROUP

BLACKBIRD ARCHITECTS

STARBUCK MINIKIN

206. Build

YOUNG CONSTRUCTION

MANIFEST BUILDING

SEGURO CONSTRUCTION

ALLEN CONSTRUCTION

LITCHFIELD BUILDERS

222. Lifestyle

INTEGRATIVE SELF

VARIANT TRAINING LAB

SILVERHORN

WESTERLAY ORCHIDS

HLAVATY DENTAL ARTS

SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART

BELROSE ESTATE JEWELERS

230. Services

KOHAN INSURANCE BROKERAGE

CHANNEL ISLANDS FIDUCIARY GROUP

SRM PRIVATE WEALTH

GOLD COAST PERMITTING

212.

Home

ECO STONE CARE

PACIFIC COAST POWERWASH

POST ALARM

FURNITURE GALLERY BY MATTRESS MIKE

ROOTER SOLUTIONS PLUMBERS

NORMAN’S NURSERY

GORDON & GRANT HOT TUBS AND SPAS

CENTRAL COAST AUDIO VISUAL

DESIGN:

Every great build begins with a plan. These experts transform raw ideas into detailed visions; drafting homes, landscapes, and interiors that balance creativity with clarity. Through sketches, materials, and collaboration, they shape concepts into blueprints for living—weaving form, function, and personality into every line.

HAYLEY BRIDGES

HAYLEY BRIDGES DESIGN

Hayley Bridges isn’t interested in interiors that merely look polished—she’s after spaces that hum with life, where ow and feeling matter as much as form. As the founder of Hayley Bridges Design in Santa Barbara, she’s built a practice on creating homes that feel deeply personal yet e ortlessly stylish. Her path to design was anything but linear: an English degree came rst, followed by a decisive turn toward interior architecture through UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona. at combination of narrative instinct and technical rigor shows in her work, which balances timeless lines with a warmth that feels lived-in rather than staged. She cut her teeth in luxury hospitality and residential design, opened a boutique furniture store in 2013, and by the next year had launched her namesake studio. Now celebrating its tenth year, the rm has become a go-to for Californians who want homes that are not only beautiful, but also intuitively designed for the rhythms of everyday life. What distinguishes Bridges’ approach is her insistence on personalization. She doesn’t chase a single aesthetic lane— say, coastal or contemporary—but instead mixes vintage lines with clean, unfussy touches, layering textures and materials until each room feels both grounded and alive. Her Santa Barbara sensibility often surfaces in subtle nods to the coast, but she’s just as comfortable dialing up pattern, color, or texture depending on her clients’ tastes. At the core of her process is listening: questionnaires that ask clients to circle words like “calm” or “bold,” conversations about favorite hotels, and thoughtful explorations of how a family actually moves through a home. e result? Spaces that are at once elevated and empathetic—rooms where children can play, friends can gather, and life feels seamlessly woven into design.

Q: What’s the most common design mistake you see clients make?

A: Scale is a big one—rugs that are too small, drapes hung too low, or furniture that just doesn’t t the proportions of a space. ese things shrink a room visually. Cohesion is another challenge, making sure rooms connect while still having their own personality.

Q: Your color palettes feel restrained but never dull. What’s your philosophy there?

A: I like neutrals that still have movement—whether it’s through pattern, texture, or subtle shifts in tone. Even when a client leans toward calm palettes, I’ll make sure the eye has reasons to wander around the room.

photo by Holly Lepere

photo by Sarita Relis

ask an expert | design

EDWARD STEED

BUENA TILE + STONE

Raised in Ventura with tile and stone in his bloodstream, Edward Steed runs Buena Tile + Stone like a curator with a passport. The company supplies materials to hospitality, builders, contractors, and design-forward homeowners in the mid-to-upper market, drawing on a global rolodex to source porcelain, stone, glass, cement, and beyond with an eye for “brands that feel greater than the sum of their parts.” Steed visits factories himself, commissioning proprietary runs when a project calls for something specific, then bringing back samples that keep the showrooms a step ahead. The result feels equal parts atelier and archive, right down to a “bone yard” of one-off hospitality overages that occasionally lets locals score world-class materials for less.

Steed reads the market like weather: classics endure while palettes swing with economic and emotional tides. Postpandemic tastes are warming up—more texture, larger formats, a reset toward materials with longevity—yet the work remains to guide clients through budget, timelines, and permanence. His advice lands with the calm of experience: choose timeless substrates, invest in what you’ll actually see every day, and if the house is truly yours for the long haul, design for joy. Each showroom keeps a design-forward specialist on hand; drawings are available with costs credited upon material purchase, so clients can move from inspiration to specification with momentum intact.

Q: How do trend cycles actually move in tile and stone?

A: They track economic and emotional cycles; after 2008 we saw a pivot to contemporary palettes, and we’re seeing another reset now.

Q: What materials feel truly timeless?

A: North African limestone and Peruvian travertine. They cycle in and out of the spotlight but never really leave the conversation.

Q: What is social media’s impact on material choices?

A: High-end hospitality gets photographed, tied to designers, and the loop accelerates adoption; people walk in asking for what they saw at marquee properties.

Q: Any advice for homeowners balancing budget and quality?

A: Spend where you’ll see it. Don’t devalue the finish materials—you’ll live with them every day. If the budget’s tight, do less and choose better.

Q: Where should clients invest if the budget is tight?

A: Focus on the areas you use every day—thoughtful lighting that shapes the mood of a space, and solid-brass plumbing fixtures from trusted makers. Choose pieces that last, feel good in daily use, and bring lasting joy beyond trends.

Q: Any materials guidance for longevity?

A: Opt for “whole” materials whenever possible—good woods, solid metals, genuine stone slabs—and invest in custom cabinetry where warranted. These choices age gracefully, feel better with use, and add enduring value to a home.

ask an expert | design

BAILEE ROBERTS

HOUSE RUPERT INTERIOR DESIGN STUDIO

House Rupert brings a London-bred eye to the Central Coast, pairing European sensibility with Californian ease. Founder Bailee Roberts favors “quiet luxury”—rooms that breathe, work hard, and age well—guided first by a home’s architecture and the people who live in it. After years in London across fashion and commercial production, Roberts formalized her training and launched House Rupert, now based in Montecito and serving residential and boutique commercial clients—from wineries to entrepreneurs to entertainers—seeking spaces that feel refined yet livable, and built with an eye toward sustainability and longevity.

Her philosophy is refreshingly unshowy: design with intent, let the client’s life lead, and invest where it matters. That means durable, natural materials; solidbrass fixtures: custom cabinetry in kitchens that see daily mileage; and a respect for the building’s bones— whether a coastal Spanish revival or a mid-century ranch. She’s candid about the pitfalls of “visual overload” and Pinterest-perfect fantasies that ignore budgets, building realities, and how a room will actually function. The goal isn’t stage dressing; it’s the backdrop to a life— cohesive, beautiful, and built to last. Services span full-scope residential interiors, boutique hospitality, space planning, materials and finishes, and furnishing and styling, with a throughline of thoughtful project management and long-term value.

Q: What common mistake do you try to prevent?

A: Choosing “cheap for now” floors or fixtures that need replacing quickly. It wastes money, energy, and materials—better to buy quality once and enjoy it for years— buy cheap, buy twice.

JOSH BLUMER, AIA & CLAY AURELL, AIA

AB DESIGN STUDIO

In Santa Barbara, AB design studio has spent the last two decades shaping not only buildings but the spirit of the city itself. Co-founded by architects Josh Blumer and Clay Aurell, the studio thrives on the belief that design is less about a fixed style than about solving real human problems. Their portfolio stretches from adaptive reuse projects like The Mill and the Lucky Penny to cultural landmarks such as the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation (MOXI). Each project reflects a mix of vision and pragmatism, revealing the firm’s gift for turning community fabric into vibrant, living spaces. Blumer and Aurell see design as a collaborative conversation—between partners, staff, clients, and the broader public—that folds architectural practice into the daily life of a city. That philosophy extends to their multidisciplinary range: architecture, interiors, and urban planning, all under one roof. For AB, the goal is never a signature aesthetic but a seamless solution tailored to context, constraints, and opportunity. They describe themselves as environmental designers, approaching each project as a complex problem to be unraveled—whether it’s a child development center, a multimillion-dollar residence, or a neighborhood master plan. Sustainability, adaptive reuse, and community engagement are not afterthoughts but central tenets, woven into their process from the first sketch to construction oversight. It’s an approach that’s earned them awards and repeat clients, but more importantly, it’s helped redefine what design can do for the Central Coast and beyond.

Q: What advantages come from your multidisciplinary approach?

A: By combining architecture, interiors, and planning, we give clients a one-stop shop. More importantly, those disciplines inform each other, creating richer, more integrated results. It keeps us curious and makes the work more rewarding.

Q: How has your global experience shaped your work?

A: Design has taken us everywhere—from consulting in Iraq to sourcing estates in France. Travel sharpens perspective, but it also reminds us that every community, whether abroad or in Santa Barbara, has unique needs that design can meet.

Q: How do you balance design ambition with real-world constraints?

A: We treat constraints—whether land use, environmental, or budgetary—as creative opportunities. Design isn’t about imposing a vision but about responding intelligently to limits and finding unexpected possibilities within them.

BAILEY HOCHHALTER

CLEAR GROUP

Clear Group was built to fix what its founder Bailey Hochhalter saw as a broken handoff culture in luxury construction—architects, designers, contractors, and subs tugging in different directions. Hochhalter’s answer is a design-build ecosystem that keeps incentives aligned and accountability clear from schematic budget to punch list; if Clear prices a concept early, the firm owns that number later. It’s a model that resists the usual lowball-then-changeorder spiral and replaces it with one team rowing the same way. Clear began taking shape in 2017, born in the wake of the Thomas Fire and Montecito mudslides, and proved itself quickly on early recovery work—a trial by debris that affirmed the thesis.

Rather than force every trade in-house, Clear runs specialized, stand-alone business units that can collaborate as needed—Clear Architecture, Clear Construction, Clear Millwork, and more—so capacity matches reality and expertise stays sharp (no “jack of all trades” shortcuts here). That modular approach even lets the millwork team supply outside GCs, a tidy stress test for quality and scale. Stylistically, the firm resists a house look on purpose; the offering is à la carte by design, with the throughline being client clarity—costs, timelines, and the simplest path to the desired result. Underneath it all sits a culture mantra that’s refreshingly unpretentious: “Be Better.” Not best—better today than yesterday, in process and product alike.

Q: Why did you set out to start Clear Group?

A: I kept seeing infighting among designers, architects, contractors, and subs; the system felt broken, so I wanted a company that aligned those roles and did the whole thing cohesively.

Q: How did your background shape that idea?

A: I speak both design and construction, thanks in part to growing up with a contractor father, so I aimed to build a company that emulates that bilingual fluency, bolstered with my degree in Business Economics.

Q: Why not vertically integrate every trade under one roof?

A: On long projects, in-house trades sit idle between phases; I prefer true specialists and stand-alone units that can collaborate without being a constant overhead burden.

Q: If your name is Clear, what are clients most often unclear about at the start?

A: Total cost, total duration, and even the “how.” We aim to remove that burden so they can say what they want, and we execute.

WWW.CLEAR.GROUP INFO@CLEAR.GROUP

photos by Blake Bronstad

ask an expert | design

KEN RADTKEY, FAIA

BLACKBIRD ARCHITECTS

Blackbird Architects makes a quiet argument for better living: envision the home as an experiential landscape— spaces that feel effortless, personal, and deeply rooted to place. Founder Ken Radtkey brings clarity shaped by time in Europe, where architecture often dissolves the boundary between indoors and out. He carries that sensibility into Santa Barbara’s coastal light and Mediterranean climate, crafting homes where architecture invites rather than imposes. Shade, air, trees, courtyards, and framed views become everyday luxuries, offering richness through simplicity. It’s a haiku-like design ethos—restraint paired with intention—where sustainability is not a feature but an outcome of elegant, responsive design. The result is poetic architecture you feel before you see, with luxury defined by space, light, and connection.

That sensibility scales across all of Blackbird’s work—from bespoke residences to campus master plans—favoring sitespecific, harmonious architecture over spectacle. Shaded outdoor rooms, and passive climate strategies shape each project. In a recent coastal bluff home, expansive sliding and pocketing glass doors erase the threshold between living spaces and the ocean’s edge, opening the house fully to panoramic views and immersive indoor-outdoor living. The effect is seamless—architecture as invitation. Whether designing a hillside retreat or a campus, Radtkey envisions architecture as an elegant framework for connection, where beauty, comfort, and ecology are inseparable.

Q: You often talk about “experience” over “building.” What do you mean?

A: If you design for experience, you create a place, a community, an environment—far richer than delivering a mere building. That’s what people actually treasure.

Q: Blackbird has worked a lot on custom homes. What advice would you give a friend who is seeking an architect to work with?

A: Find a good listener. It is a two-way street to find the best solutions. It’s important that your architect listens to you—your values, your vision— and listens to the site.

Q: What’s your vision for downtown Santa Barbara over the next century?

A: Mix living, work, culture, and food so daily life is walkable and bikeable. Monocultures fail; mixed ecosystems thrive.

Q: For people updating existing homes, what’s an accessible first step for bringing more “green” into their life?

A: Focus on simple but transformative moves that dramatically improve your connection to place— such as expansive openings that afford views, natural light, and air.

photo by Ryan Sharkey

photo by Alex Nye

NATE MODISETTE

STARBUCK MINIKIN

In Santa Barbara, Nate Modisette keeps a venerable cabinet shop humming with the quiet rigor of a watchmaker. A third-generation builder who fell into the family trade and then dove in headfirst, he took the helm of Starbuck Minikin after meeting acclaimed cabinetmaker Charlie Starbuck in late 2019 and choosing to carry the flag rather than reinvent it. The shop’s calling card is patience: traditional butt-hinged doors tuned to last decades, crisp contemporary reveals with grain carried through panels, and millwork that reads as heirloom rather than commodity. Clients arrive for the handwork and stay for the collaboration, moving from sketches to samples to finished pieces that feel inevitable in the space.

Starbuck Minikin focuses almost entirely on interiors—bespoke kitchens, baths, closets, entry doors, even furniture— executed in domestic hardwoods and protected by close-knit relationships with specialist finishers. This is cabinetry as architecture: form braided to function, drawers mapped to daily rituals, spice racks sized to the exact jar. The team isn’t a production line; it’s a small shop sustaining a 90-year tradition with designers, architects, and clients as true co-authors and, in Modisette’s words, patrons of a craft that changes how a house lives. Every piece is tailored, not templated, and every decision aims at that subtle, unmistakable feel of work made by talented hands.

Q: What do clients actually notice when cabinetry is truly handmade?

A: Even without a trained eye, people feel the difference—the way doors sit on butt hinges, the tight lines, the way it all weathers and patinas. It changes how the house lives.

Q: How can millwork shape daily routines at home?

A: Placement and layout create flow—where you drop a wallet, how you move through a suite. Done right, it supports a predictable, efficient rhythm in the home.

Q: How do you approach the form-versus-function puzzle?

A: It’s central to our service. We propose interior solutions from basic organizers to fully custom layouts, with clear cost correlations, so the function matches the vision.

BUILD:

From foundation to finish, these experts build vision into reality. With precision, foresight, and craft, they guide homeowners through complexity, balancing design ambition with practical detail. Their work turns challenges into opportunities, ensuring every structure—indoors or out—endures with beauty, resilience, and steadfastness.

JEREMY

BEAUCHEMIN

YOUNG CONSTRUCTION

When Jeremy Beauchemin stepped into ownership of Young Construction in 2024, it wasn’t a disruption but a seamless continuation of the company’s DNA. A UCSB alum who found his calling in the trades nearly three decades ago, Beauchemin joined Young in 2012 as a superintendent and steadily worked his way up. That insider’s path—superintendent to senior project manager to president—mirrors the firm’s culture of longevity and loyalty, where leadership is cultivated on the job site as much as in the office. Founded in 1978 by brothers Bob and David Young, the company has built a reputation for precision-driven homes and commercial spaces, backed by a team that often stays for decades. Beauchemin’s leadership doubles down on that legacy, bringing his sharp eye for constructability and his knack for collaborative planning to projects that range from contemporary steel-and-glass residences to adaptive commercial spaces like The Lark and Moxy Santa Barbara hotel.

Young Construction’s scope spans the full arc of building: early-stage budgeting with proprietary cost models, detailed constructability reviews with architects and engineers, day-to-day site management, and conscientious warranty service. Their sweet spot sits in the $5-$25 million range, with a fluid balance between residential and commercial work depending on the economy. Clients are brought into the fold as early as possible—often a year before breaking ground—to avoid pitfalls like relying too heavily on cost-per-square-foot math. From hillside access challenges that can cut productivity by a third to the growing demands of water-wise systems and fire resilience, Beauchemin’s team thrives in complexity. It’s here, in the intricate dance of budget, schedule, and design ambition, that Young Construction has built both its reputation and its future.

Q: Contemporary architecture can be unforgiving. What’s key to getting it right?

A: Experience. Concrete, steel, and glass leave no room for error. Our team brings over 100 years of collective project management experience to deliver precision and avoid costly mistakes.

Q: What’s the most common budgeting mistake you see?

A: Relying on square-foot costs. It ignores site conditions, exterior living areas, management costs, etc. With a site plan, floor plans and elevations we can deliver a conceptual budget within days.

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CHLOE KIRK, BEAU SCHMIDT, NICK HART

MANIFEST BUILDING

Manifest Building has grown from a scrappy experiment in drought-conscious turf into a full-fledged design-build studio that treats outdoor living as both canvas and craft. What began with Beau Schmidt’s generational roots in construction and an opportunistic leap into synthetic grass during California’s drought has matured into a multidisciplinary team shaping some of Santa Barbara’s most refined landscapes. With in-house design, construction, and ongoing maintenance all under one roof, the firm creates spaces that feel lived in from day one, balancing hardscape, architecture, and plant life with an instinctive grasp of how clients actually move through their homes. Their mantra— function is beauty—threads through projects that range from Bel Air entertaining terraces to Riviera retreats, each one tailored to its microclimate, materials, and the rhythms of contemporary life.

What sets Manifest apart isn’t just the seamless blending of disciplines, but a culture of communication that feels refreshingly transparent. Every project runs through shared digital channels where clients, architects, stone masons, and lighting specialists exchange images, updates, and even end-of-day videos. It’s a system that not only streamlines logistics but also draws clients into the creative process, allowing them to watch their visions unfold in real time. Beyond the build, Manifest continues the conversation with a dedicated maintenance division, tending landscapes with the same care used to design them. That continuity—from sketch to shovel to stewardship—defines the firm’s approach, making their work less about delivering one-time projects and more about curating lasting ways of living outdoors.

Q: How do you approach choosing materials for a project?

A: We educate clients from the start, walking through the pros and cons of each option. It’s about understanding not just aesthetics but also longevity— whether that’s a non-slip porcelain surface that won’t stain or a stone that ages gracefully.

Q: How do you balance design trends with practical living?

A: Casual conversations are key. Clients may want a pizza oven or six vegetable boxes, but when we learn more about their lifestyle, sometimes two planter boxes make more sense. It’s about tailoring features so they’re used and loved.

Q: What types of projects are most transformative for clients?

A: Outdoor kitchens, pools, and entertainment areas often provide the biggest return on investment. Buyers are drawn to homes with functional outdoor spaces, and clients tell us their properties feel more complete, more livable, after these upgrades.

photo by Blake Bronstad Photography

TODD A. BUYNAK

SEGURO CONSTRUCTION

Seguro Construction brings a calm, craftsman’s rigor to projects that often feel chaotic elsewhere. Founder Todd

A. Buynak has worked in Santa Barbara since 1997 and favors a proactive, people-first build process that keeps surprises to a minimum. His signature move is a pre-construction Professional Service Agreement (PSA): homeowners hire his team to open walls, test systems, and scope utilities before permits are pulled, so the final proposal lands close to reality and change orders stay rare. Daily cloud-based reports and clear, neighbor-friendly communication (complete with courtesy letters—and the occasional handyman fix next door) extend that ethos from jobsite to street. The result is a steady, low-drama rhythm even on high-expectation Montecito jobs.

Beyond custom remodels and full builds, Seguro’s service arc stretches past the punch list. Buynak schedules 3-, 6-, and 11-month tune-ups, tightening doors, adjusting cabinets, and catching small shifts before they become big annoyances—backed by thoughtful O&M manuals for how the house actually lives. It’s all rooted in a simple standard: under-promise, over-perform, and “work for the house,” even as the owner chooses finishes. That blend of craft and choreography—paired with transparent pricing and schedule discipline—sets Seguro apart in a market where budgets and patience are tested daily.

Q: You mention “working for the house.” What do you mean?

A: The owner decides, but my job is to protect the structure—sound foundations, proper waterproofing, things we won’t bend on. That’s non-negotiable craft.

Q: What’s the most overlooked cost on ADUs?

A: Site utilities—especially the wastewater lateral and getting proper slope. Sometimes you need an ejector; power and gas runs can also shift the budget fast.

Q: What problem does your PSA actually solve for homeowners?

A: It turns the unknowns into knowns—we open walls, crawl the attic and crawlspace, test water pressure, scope the sewer, and coordinate with Edison and the gas company so the final bid and schedule are solid and change orders are minimal.

Q: When is the PSA most critical?

A: Before plans go in for permit. That’s when exploratory work has the biggest payoff, and the design can still adjust to what the house really needs.

WWW.SEGUROCONSTRUCTION.COM TODD@SEGUROCONSTRUCTION.COM

... ask an expert | build

AARON PICK, CEO

ALLEN CONSTRUCTION

Allen Construction has built its reputation on elevating health, resilience, and sustainability as central components of the building process. In Santa Barbara, that means homes with tight building envelopes, indoor air quality, and assemblies designed to stay dry and mold-free, all tuned to withstand a coastline with smoke seasons and salt air. Pick states it clearly: people want homes that are safe, quiet, and durable, and the contractor should help partner in that conversation early on with architects and clients. e company’s roots go back over 40 years to founder Dennis Allen, whose sustainability ethos became a guiding principle that continues to shape every project. Equally de ning is the culture of ownership. Allen is 100% employee-owned, meaning project managers, carpenters, and coordinators alike carry the responsibility and pride of ownership into every job. at sense of collective stake shows up in long tenures, careful craftsmanship, and the client experience. Traditions like core-value awards, employee-of-the-year voting, and team celebrations reinforce the shared mission while creating a workplace where people feel valued and connected. For Pick, it’s also about legacy: the company inherited Dennis Allen’s vision and translates it into client experiences that balance Spanish Colonial restorations, crisp contemporary builds, and the region’s growing demand for ADUs. In a place where remodels dominate, Allen’s emphasis on defensible space, ember-resistant detailing, and durable material choices brings re-conscious resilience into the everyday language of design.

Q: What makes for building a “healthy home” in your opinion?

A: Indoor air quality, noise control, durability, and safety matter. We care about smoke inhalation, asthma, and mold-free environments, and a luxury contractor should have a strong say in that conversation.

Q: First steps you recommend for a resilience-focused remodel?

A: Start by “thinking like an ember.” Create defensible space, upgrade roo ng and siding, protect decks, and block ember paths through vents, eaves, and other openings.

Q: Where do most homeowners feel performance gains indoors?

A: Tight sealing with smart ventilation, humidity control, and assemblies that shed water and dry properly so the house stays comfortable and quiet.

photo by Nicole Franzen

custom wood registers—so the nished work feels both functional and distinctive. e result is a practice that moves uidly between old and new, applying the same precision and craft whether building a modern residence or restoring a historic property.

Q: What makes historic renovations satisfying?

A: e history, the architecture, and the logic of the original materials. I love honoring that while bringing spaces back to life.

Q: Where do modern systems t into old envelopes?

STEVE LITCHFIELD, PRESIDENT & STEVE POTTER, V.P. OF OPERATIONS

LITCHFIELD BUILDERS

Abuilder’s eye honed by decades of experience with elaborate projects gives Steve Litch eld an unusual calm around complexity. He talks about projects with a clear understanding of the challenges and a steady focus on quality and integrity. After years running high-end jobs with Gi n & Crane, he launched Litch eld Builders with his wife and set a clear course: tackle ambitious residential work where every decision becomes a design opportunity. at vision shows across their portfolio—whether lifting a Rincon Point home 14 inches out of a ood zone, building new custom residences from the ground up, or reworking existing spaces to integrate technology and performance without compromising design.

e rm thrives on range. Historic properties are approached with rigor, honoring original materials and details, while modern projects allow for sleek solutions, smart systems, and contemporary craftsmanship. Litch eld Builders is equally comfortable engineering discreet HVAC systems into a 1920s cottage as they are delivering fully automated lighting and AV in a new coastal residence. ey treat code requirements as opportunities for clean, intentional design, and elevate everyday details—whether it’s door hardware, weatherstripping, or

A: Quietly—AV, lighting, automation, and HVAC are integrated so the house reads as authentic while performing like new.

Q: What happens when codes collide with authenticity?

A: We follow the register’s requirements on materials, colors, and nishes, get approvals, and then advise owners on details that stay true to the era when choices are open. You make smart concessions—grounded receptacles, GFCIs, even sprinklers—then execute with craft so the solution looks intentional.

Q: What’s one detail that can improve the enjoyment of a home every day?

A: Door hardware. Hefty, well-made pieces can quietly become the home’s signature.

LITCHFIELDBUILDERSSB.COM INFO@LITCHFIELDBUILDERSSB.COM

Steve Potter

Steve Litchﬁeld

HOME:

Our homes deserve care long after they’re built. These experts keep them comfortable, functional, and pristine—whether through thoughtful furnishings, adept maintenance, or smart systems that age gracefully. From stone to spas, plumbing to power, their work preserves comfort and guarantees our spaces remain welcoming for years to come.

PIERRE HANNON, THE STONE WHISPERER…

ECO STONE CARE

Pierre Hannon doesn’t just fix stone; he performs what his daughter Catherine calls “stone surgery,” a specialty born from decades on job sites and a knack for solving the failures no one else will touch. The family-run Eco Stone Care focuses on the hairline disasters that spider from sink cutouts—where old steel reinforcement bars rust after years of water intrusion—by cutting out the damaged section, removing the rod, and refabricating the stone so the crack doesn’t return. It’s exacting work that pairs craft with chemistry, and the team stands behind it with a lifetime result on most countertop repairs. In a market enamored with marble, limestone, and quartzite—and the stains and etching that follow—Eco Stone Care couples restoration with straight talk: what to seal, what to avoid, and how to live beautifully with natural materials.

After selling his previous fabrication company, Hannon built a nimble practice around repair, refinishing, and maintenance—from polishing etched baths and floors to reviving Saltillo pavers—joined now by Catherine, who returned to grow the business and deepen its client education mission. Their technicians are long-tenured craftsmen who colormatch epoxy by hand, feather in veining with tiny brushes, and leave homeowners with both a renewed surface and a plan to keep it that way. It’s not flashy; it’s deeply useful, the kind of stewardship that saves clients from costly replacements and keeps good stone in service. In a region where design ambition meets hard water and coastal living, Eco Stone Care has become the quiet specialist others recommend when “brand new” needs to happen without starting over.

Q: What stones are you most called to maintain in Santa Barbara and Montecito?

A: Many homes have marble and limestone with waterfall details—beautiful but soft—so we’re often refinishing and resealing, and educating on realistic kitchen and bath care.

Q: What do homeowners misunderstand most about stone?

A: That all stones are kitchen-proof. Marble is calcium carbonate; acids—lemon, tomato, wine—etch it. Stone choice should match lifestyle and its function… sealing plus proper cleaners are essential.

Q: When do you tell a client replacement may be the only answer?

A: Deep, stubborn stains—especially oil in porous stones or certain rust stains in marble—sometimes require long poultice cycles or become candidates for more extensive intervention. We teach clients the process so they can manage it themselves over time.

(805) 218-6237

an expert | home

CHE HATCHETT

PACIFIC COAST POWERWASH

Pacific Coast Powerwash runs on a simple premise: make the built world look new again—and know exactly how to do it. Founder Che Hatchett grew up in Montecito and never left, building a service rooted in local trust and hardwon craft. His crews split their time between sunlit facades and after-hours plazas, with roughly 60 percent of work on the commercial side, including shopping centers and restaurant patios that have to gleam by dawn. The team’s toolkit is purposebuilt—commercial hot-water trailers, surface cleaners that glide like lawn mowers, and adjustable guns and nozzles tuned to wood, stucco, tile, or stone—so they clean precisely without scarring the surface. For homeowners, the cadence is usually once a year; for public-facing spaces, it’s weekly, monthly, or whatever the traffic dictates.

Hatchett’s edge is equal parts method and obsession. New jobs start with a walkthrough so he can spec the right pressure, heat, extension wands, and crew. Hot water isn’t a luxury: it’s how grease actually lifts and how gum melts cleanly from sidewalks rather than smearing. And while anyone can rent a sprayer, the telltale stripes of a DIY job—the “gun marks” and missed patches that only appear when the surface dries—are exactly what his team is trained to avoid. Founded in 2009 and still family-rooted in the Hedgerow, Pacific Coast Powerwash keeps Montecito’s thresholds and thoroughfares camera-ready, one careful pass at a time.

Q: What equipment makes the biggest difference?

A: Large hot-water trailers and surface cleaners. The surface cleaner spins like a propeller under a “lawn-mower” deck for even, streak-free results.

Q: How long do jobs usually take?

A: A house is usually one full day. On the commercial side, it depends—sometimes three or four medium patios in a night, sometimes just one big shopping center that takes the entire night.

Q: What sets your crew apart from a DIY enthusiast or other cleaning outfits?

A: Two things: equipment and experience. We only do pressure washing—nothing else. My guys do it every day, with the best commercial equipment you can buy. That’s a big difference from someone renting a unit at Home Depot.

ROB POST AND GINA

POST-FRANCO

POST ALARM

Nearly 70 years after its founding by a retired police chief, Post Alarm remains one of Southern California’s most distinctive guardians of safety—a rare blend of cutting-edge technology and oldfashioned neighborhood presence. Now helmed by thirdgeneration leaders Rob Post and Gina Post-Franco, the family company has grown from its early days of burglar alarms into a comprehensive security service spanning residential and commercial systems, fire protection, video surveillance, and a proprietary patrol division. With its own monitoring center and a reputation for conciergestyle attention, Post Alarm has carved out a niche where prevention, detection, and response are woven into a seamless whole. The company’s approach balances advanced AI-driven cameras and smart video with the simple reassurance of a patrol car circling the block, a duality that speaks to both innovation and tradition. What makes Post Alarm stand apart is not only its layered defense model—hardwired reliability, proactive monitoring, and strategic patrol schedules—but also its deep immersion in the communities it protects. The company works hand-in-hand with homeowners’ associations, individual residents, and local law

enforcement, tailoring solutions that prioritize both security and privacy. Their officers are trained well beyond state requirements, with ongoing instruction in deescalation and crisis response, elevating the patrol force far above the stereotype of the sleeping guard in a parked car. Add to that a strong civic presence, from local parades to community meetings, and Post Alarm’s service philosophy becomes clear: security is as much about human trust and connection as it is about cameras and alarms.

Q: What’s your advice to homeowners for simple but effective security?

A: Always arm your system, whether you’re gone for five minutes or five weeks. Many burglaries happen during quick errands. Also, make the house look occupied— lights, shades, and removing visible packages all help.

Q: How has technology changed the security landscape in recent years?

A: Technology has advanced dramatically, especially in the last five years. Cameras now come equipped with analytics and AI that can detect not just people, but even fire or smoke. At the same time, criminals have adapted with tools like signal jammers, which is why we’ve moved back to hardwiring certain systems for reliability.

HTTPS://POSTALARM.COM

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GARRET GUSTASON

FURNITURE GALLERY BY MATTRESS MIKE

Santa Barbara-raised and showroom-bred, Garret Gustason runs Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike with the quiet confidence of someone who’s helped customers choose couches since middle school, because he has. The store has scaled from a mattress shop to a full-line gallery—living room, bedroom, dining, and office—anchored by nameplate makers like Stressless, American Leather, and La-Z-Boy. A sprawling 55,000-square-foot floor can overwhelm a first pass, so Gustason’s team trims the noise with smart questions about space, habits, and budget. The operation is non-commission by design, which keeps the conversation focused on fit and feel rather than upsell. In a town that loves familiar faces, his father Mike is still part of the daily experience, teaching Garret something new everyday—a living reminder that this 30-year enterprise is very much a family act with deep local roots. Gustason’s advice is simple: invest where your body lives. Sofas and mattresses rule the core comfort essentials column since the quality there shapes everyday energy and recovery. Sleep isn’t just a third of life; the quality of that third drives the other two-thirds, so the “right” mattress is the one that serves the sleeper—not the priciest tag on the floor. Scale also matters: in a living room, less can be more, with thoughtful sizing that welcomes conversation rather than swallowing the space. And for shoppers, a little prep pays off—photos, room measurements, and a sense of color cues help the team cut decision fatigue fast and dial in something that feels like home.

Q: Besides budget, what is a simple list shoppers should bring to speed up decisions?

A: Photos of the room, key measurements—including walls, doors, fireplaces—and a target size with a small range. Color cues help a lot, too.

Q: Tere can be so many options when selecting furniture, how do you help people beat decision fatigue?

A: We qualify the essentials, then narrow options quickly; many items come in sleepers, sectionals, and thousands of fabrics, so guidance is everything.

Q: What’s some of the biggest ROI pieces when furnishing on a budget?

A: Your sofa and your mattress. Those are the pieces that carry your comfort every day.

FERNANDO GALICIA

ROOTER SOLUTIONS PLUMBERS

In a eld where “good enough” can ood a day, Fernando Galicia insists on spotless process as much as spotless oors. Rooter Solutions shows up like a well-drilled crew—uniformed techs, shoe covers for boots and even equipment, moving blankets at the ready. e company pairs that culture with one of the longest warranties in the game, a quiet ex that underscores how they aim for permanent xes, not temporary Band-Aids. Most of the work is residential—about 80 percent—but Galicia’s team comes prepared for every scenario, from leaky faucets to full sewer replacements. Few companies in the region own hydro-jetters— machines that run upwards of $70,000 each—but Rooter Solutions treats them as standard. ese industrial-strength systems blast away years of grease, scale, and roots, restoring pipes to near-new condition. Basically, they bring the whole toolbox. With free camera inspections standard, clients get transparent evidence and options before deciding on scope. Combined with trenchless technology, lining solutions, and a quality-control manager who signs o on every repair, Galicia ensures clients get durable xes rather than the stop-gap snaking that leaves problems festering. Galicia’s mission is local and generational: a family-owned company that hires and mentors young technicians to become skilled, respectful problem-solvers—neighbors you’re glad to have in your home. In an era of consolidation, he’s proudly independent, betting on service, training, and community impact as the winning long game.

Q: What separates a good plumber from a bad one in your view?

A: Cleanliness, consistent training, and quality control.

Q: Can you talk about working in higher-end homes, like Montecito?

blankets at the ready. e company pairs that culture with one of the longest

Q: What’s one of the biggest misconceptions homeowners have about drain problems?

A: Absolutely. We train our team to be careful with sensitive oors and countertops, but also to treat clients with respect. e goal is for homeowners to feel comfortable letting our technicians into their space.

percent—but Galicia’s team comes prepared for every scenario, from leaky faucets at it’s normal for drains to back up. It’s not. A healthy system

A: at it’s normal for drains to back up. It’s not. A healthy system shouldn’t clog regularly, so when we clear a line, we always follow with a camera inspection to nd out the real cause.

Q: What role does water quality play in your work?

Most people don’t realize how much chlorine and harsh chemicals

A: Most people don’t realize how much chlorine and harsh chemicals are in their tap water. We test it on the spot and then o er wholehome ltration solutions for healthier living.

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PETER GRACE

NORMAN’S NURSERY

Norman’s Nursery unfolds as a kind of open-air chronicle of California landscapes, tracing its roots back to Grace’s great-grandfather and the experimental wave of growers who shaped the state’s plant palette in the 1960s. The first fields were in Carpinteria, a site still treasured by the family and now open to homeowners, designers, and architects for hands-on selection. Trees and shrubs are raised with a sensitivity to place—coastal stock for salt-air gardens, desert-hardened material for the Coachella Valley—so each specimen arrives already tuned to its future home. Wandering among Monterey cypress, olive groves, coastal oaks, and bursts of loropetalum color offers a tangible kind of decision-making that no online catalog can quite capture.

Grace leads as a fourth-generation CEO with a retail welcome mat alongside deep wholesale roots. The nursery grows across more than 1,000 acres in six distinct California climates, allowing a rare cradle-to-canopy offering—from sapling to 16-foot shade tree—delivered and planted with contractor support or in collaboration with a client’s landscape architect. Recent work ranges from Lotusland and the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden to a verdant refresh at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club; at home, Carpinteria’s 30 acres become a showroom where meadow grasses move with the breeze and hedges of Pittosporum tenuifolium set a quiet rhythm. The family legacy continues while staying nimble and neighborly.

Q: What’s the first principle you suggest homeowners use when choosing trees and shrubs?

A: Make sure the selection was grown in the climate it will live in. We grow in six distinct climates in California, so we can match material to where it will be planted.

Q: Why does coastal stock matter so much for seaside properties?

A: The same species grown inland can struggle with cooler, cloudier, saltier coastal air. A tree raised on the coast is already adapted and establishes more reliably.

Q: Top performers you’re reaching for in Santa Barbara County?

A: Pittosporum tenuifolium for hedging, several olive classes, loropetalum for color, redwoods in cooler Santa Ynez spots, and Monterey cypress along the coast.

Q: Where do you land on natives versus ornamentals?

A: It’s about what the homeowner loves, integrated thoughtfully. I’m especially fond of our coastal oaks, and of designing meadows of mixed grasses that move with the breeze.

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JOE BOLGER

GORDON & GRANT

For 50 years, Gordon & Grant has kept Santa Barbara in hot water in the best sense, crafting wooden hot tubs that feel as elemental as a hillside sunset. Gary Gordon, a Santa Barbara native, started the business in 1974 and remains the sole owner today. Joe Bolger steers the operation with a builder’s eye—site visits with homeowners, consultations with architects, contractors and landscape designers, clear guidance on foundations, utilities, and access—so every installation starts smart and stays beautiful. The old-school charm carries a local lineage from Mountain Drive’s wine-vat soaks to today’s round and oval barrel tubs, which are still manufactured downtown. Bolger’s team matches craft with practicality. Their custom wood tubs offer reliability, water-tight integrity and thoughtful siting so owners use them often and maintain them easily. Modern portable spas like Jacuzzi, Sundance, and Marquis brands are a large part of the decades-old business and offer quick, self-contained setups, yet the wooden tubs hold court for their aesthetic alone; each custom-built hot tub a part of backyard architecture as much as a place to unwind. Clients choose what works best depending on their personal preference. Either way, the result is the same: durable builds, thoughtful detailing, and a backyard ritual that makes the home a little warmer. And as Bolger notes, having lived here for 25 years and whose wife was born here—it’s hot tub weather every day of the year.

Q: What helps clients decide which type of tub to choose?

A: Portable spas offer a modern vibe, durability, and style, along with easy installation and maintenance. Custom wooden hot tubs allow customization in seat height and jet locations, plus that unique vintage soak.

Q: How do you help clients pick the right location for spas and hot tubs?

A: I recommend close proximity to the house so it gets used more often. Sit in a few possible spots and notice what you prefer to look at from that space. We’ll also look at how easily utilities reach that site.

Q: What’s your baseline maintenance routine for owners?

A: Give it five to 10 minutes once a week: check pH and sanitizer, adjust the chemicals accordingly, clean the filter at least monthly, and change the water two to three times a year.

an expert | home

CHRIS WILSON

CENTRAL COAST AUDIO VISUAL

At Central Coast Audio Visual, technology is less about gadgets and more about creating spaces that work seamlessly. Since 2009, Chris Wilson and his Carpinteria-based team have been designing systems that make complex homes and businesses easy to run. Networks are built to be both fast and low in EMF exposure, Wi-Fi can be toggled at will, and one streamlined app takes the place of a dozen competing logins. The company’s projects stretch from private theaters with Dolby Atmos sound that outdo the cinema to boardrooms where auto-tracking cameras finally make hybrid meetings smooth. Every system is tailored, with an emphasis on reliability and support long after installation.

Reliability is often the first thing clients notice. Central Coast Audio Visual designs systems that hold up in real-world conditions, whether that means keeping cameras and gates online during an outage with generator and Starlink backup, or ensuring networks stay fast and stable as new technology arrives. Design choices carry equal weight: motorized shades that noticeably lower interior temperatures, lighting controls that replace switch clutter with clean keypads, and “all-off” or night modes that make everyday life easier. In a region where wildfire and power loss are real concerns, Central Coast Audio Visual has even tied fire-mitigation systems into smart controls. It’s thoughtful planning paired with responsive service, ensuring clients live with technology that feels simple, resilient, and dependable.

Q: Technology can change so fast, how do you future proof for fast-moving tech?

A: Use the right Ethernet cable from the start, leave ample conduit for upgrades, and plan on Wi-Fi refreshes about every five years.

Q: What’s one upgrade to a home you think people end up enjoying most?

A: Whole-home lighting control. It delivers clean keypads, true “all-off” scenes, and thoughtful night modes. It’s elegant and practical, something you end up appreciating every single day.

Q: With smart technology, “app overload” is a common feeling. How can people avoid this?

A: By pulling everything into one clean interface. People shouldn’t have to jump between 20 different apps just to run their house.

photo by Leela Cyd

photo by Warner Group

LIFESTYLE:

Living well is about more than structures—it’s about experiences, beauty, and balance. These experts help us thrive inside and out, from wellness and fitness to orchids, art, and jewelry. With craft and care, they design the details that enrich daily life and make our worlds feel whole.

ERIC WALLACE

INTEGRATIVE SELF

Somatic practitioner Eric Wallace treats the nervous system like a living landscape—one you relearn by walking it. His life-coaching practice, Integrative Self, blends somatic experiencing, co-regulating touch, Asian bodywork, energy work, and nature-based ritual into bespoke plans that return clients to sensation and presence. Sessions often leave the office for “somatic rewilding,” where breath, orientation, and elemental cues coax the body out of vigilance and into coherence. Wallace frames the work with five clear agreements—Consent, Deep Inquiry, Unconditional Welcoming, Learning Consciousness, and Honest Effort—so the container feels both sacred and grounded. The result is less performance, more presence; less fixing, more remembering. He starts simply: arrival. Clients orient to place, name what they notice, then re-enter their bodies through breath and gentle movement. Arms sweep skyward and arc down to sketch a “proximal field,” a felt boundary that restores safety and differentiation. From there, Wallace teaches a four-point compass for staying present—place, position, time, duration—so attention has coordinates and the system can settle. When regulation returns, creativity follows: purpose rekindles, expression blooms, and decision-making sharpens. Wallace’s approach reads like disciplined wilderness craft applied to psyche— practical, sensory, and immediately usable in daily life.

Q: Define an “integrated self” in your framework.

A: Presence with differentiation: a witness online while feeling fully. You can sense, name, and communicate your experience without being swept by it.

Q: How do you see technology affecting nervous systems?

A: Constant input drives hypervigilance and dopamine dependence. The fix isn’t rejection—it’s awareness, boundaries, and balancing output with embodied creation.

Q: A quick practice someone can use today?

A: Pause and run the sequence: “I’m in this place, facing this direction, at this time, for this duration.” Then breathe and sweep your arms to feel your boundary.

WWW.INTEGRATIVESELF.COM

ERIC@INTEGRATIVESELF.COM (805) 722-8091

ask an expert | lifestyle

KELLY MARTIN

VARIANT TRAINING LAB

Variant Training Lab is a high-performance training facility where all athletes who want to train well can achieve their strength and conditioning goals through their proprietary “Test, Treat, Train” methodology. Clients begin in the biomechanics lab (the “Test” part) where strength asymmetries and movement quality are measured… think left versus right imbalances. The lab work identifies areas of weakness and strength while establishing a baseline to track future (i.e. strength, mobility, symmetry, etc.) performance and goal achievement. From there, the in-house physical therapy provides a “hands-on” assessment and treatment— “Treat”—allowing Variant to develop/complete an evidence-based personalized strength and training program. Then the client is ready to “Train” under the guidance of expert trainers in a first class/semi-private training setting.

Simply put… the “Test, Treat, Train” approach is designed to develop the athlete in all of us—supporting each client’s desire to live an active lifestyle (walking/ running, surfing, skiing, pickleball, etc.) to their fullest potential, while building and maintaining muscle, avoiding injury, optimizing mobility and symmetry, improving bone density, and reducing fall risk. Variant’s new eight-week Women’s Training Program provides an introduction to a simple truth: Women need the benefits of a strength and conditioning training program designed to support bone density and muscle building and preservation, with targeted recovery to lower cortisol and inflammation. In the end, it is not perfection that defines us, but the courage to keep moving forward despite the imperfections.

Q: Wearables and apps are becoming more common for athletes and people exercising. Where do these technologies fall short?

A: Steps and heart rate are helpful, but they don’t evaluate movement quality or asymmetries. If you care about longevity, you need deeper assessment and coaching.

Q: What patterns do you see most in clients?

A: Many 40+ clients simply aren’t strong enough for what they love to do. We build strength to support bone density and teach people to “train for” activities like hiking, then use recovery so they’re ready the next day.

Q: How individualized are the programs?

A: Highly. We have sport-specific metrics from youth to 70+, check progress every six to eight weeks, and adjust if the data isn’t improving—no guessing.

Q: How do you personally define “healthy”?

A: Being able to do what you love—play with your kids, hike, move—without pain, and feeling mentally well by prioritizing stress regulation and self-care.

NOEL BENDLE

SILVERHORN DESIGN STUDIO

At Silverhorn’s Coast Village Road Design Studio, design starts with a conversation across the table. Noel Bendle sits with clients to sketch ideas, compare proportions, and sort through stones, treating the design process as collaborative rather than prescriptive. His background in Idar-Oberstein, Germany’s centuries-old hub for gem cutting, trained him to balance discipline with flexibility, and that education continues to shape how he works today. Each project begins with the fundamentals—what the client wants, how the piece should feel on the body—and develops into something that balances function, beauty, and longevity. Bendle sees gold and gemstones as equal partners: one may take the lead, but both matter in creating a piece that endures.

Founded in 1976, Silverhorn has built its reputation on one-ofa-kind pieces that combine European-style craftsmanship with a diverse range of gemstones sourced worldwide. The Santa Barbara studio doubles as both showroom and workshop, allowing clients to see artisans at the bench as their pieces take shape. Bendle has led the Design Studio since 1996, guiding commissions from first idea to final polish, whether for museum collections, red carpet appearances, or private jewelry boxes meant to last generations. The studio’s approach favors timeless design over short-lived trends, ensuring each piece feels relevant now and decades from now.

Q: What challenges affect design right now?

A: Gold is very expensive at the moment, and some gemstones are no longer being mined. Availability shifts and prices play a big role.

Q: How do you approach inventory and sourcing stones?

A: We watch the global market—Australia, Madagascar, different regions—and respond to what’s available. It’s a balancing act because supply can change without warning.

Q: Which stones do clients tend to overlook?

A: Many haven’t heard of certain colored stones that have great fire and color. We like to show them those unusual options alongside the classics.

Q: How do you decide whether the design focuses on stone or metal?

A: It depends on the piece. Sometimes the gemstone takes the lead and the gold is the undertone. Other times the goldwork carries the design and the stone brightens it.

ask an expert | lifestyle

TOINE OVERGAAG

WESTERLAY ORCHIDS

Westerlay Orchids didn’t sprout overnight—it grew from a family leap across the Atlantic and a knack for reading the horizon. The Overgaags emigrated from the Netherlands to Carpinteria in 1978, launching a cutrose business before pivoting around 2000 to potted orchids just as technology and know-how reshaped the field. Today, Westerlay focuses on Phalaenopsis—the gateway orchid for many—leveraging precise climate control to time blooms for holidays and reliably deliver long-lasting flowers. With a projected 4.5 million plants in the coming year, Westerlay is among the nation’s top producers and the largest on the West Coast, supplying major grocers while keeping a welcoming retail storefront at the greenhouse. The company’s slogan is simple and disarming: “Every orchid has a story.”

Scale doesn’t come at the expense of conscience. As Southern California’s largest commercial orchid grower, Westerlay has invested in solar, energy curtains, irrigation recycling (cutting its carbon footprint by 43% from 2018-2022), and extensive dehumidification across seven acres—quietly engineering a more sustainable bloom. Most plants head to supermarkets and bigbox partners across the western third of the U.S. and Canada via climate-controlled trucks; locally, shoppers can visit the on-site store for arrangements, ceramics, and expert guidance. Care, Overgaag says, is elegantly straightforward: soak thoroughly about once a week, then give bright, indirect light—advice that helps those three-month blooms return for an encore. Orchids for everyone, yes—but with the craftsmanship and consistency of a house that’s learned to make nature feel at home.

Q: How long will a bloom last—and can it rebloom?

A: Orchids can flower and last in your house for about three months pretty typically, and with some luck and reasonable care, you should be able to get that plant to reflower again a few months later.

Q: Your slogan is “Every orchid has a story.” Do you have a favorite orchid story of your own?

A: When I first met my wife, I was desperate to impress her, so I gave her a couple of orchids from the greenhouse. I don’t know what happened to those plants, but I remember how much I wanted to impress her. My dad also once rescued a fallen orchid from the greenhouse floor, potted it at home, and it thrived—that one stuck with me, too.

SHAWN HLAVATY DDS

HLAVATY DENTAL ARTS

At Hlavaty Dental Arts, Dr. Shawn Hlavaty has rebuilt the dental visit from the ground up—less clinic, more calm. Operatories are wide and uncluttered; instruments are tucked out of sight; patients settle in with noise-canceling headphones, soft jazz, blankets, and nature visuals while the technical hardware stays hidden. e idea is simple and radical: remove the visual and sensory triggers that feed anxiety, then take the time to explain each step so treatment feels human, not hurried. It’s hospitality with handpieces, and it shows in details from ambient scent to seating more “lounge” than lab.

Hlavaty o ers a wide spectrum of care—from cosmetic veneers and implants to advanced 3D imaging, precision scanning, and oral sedation—all delivered in a setting designed to feel more like a spa than a clinic. e practice blends spa-level ease with modern tools and techniques, o ering cosmetic work, implants, 3D imaging and scanning, and options like oral sedation when patients want “one-anddone” care without remembering the procedure. By pairing state-of-the-art technology with a tranquil, hospitality-driven atmosphere, the practice rede nes what dental care can be, giving people a real reason to smile.

Q: Where does the “art” enter your dentistry?

A: My rst career was landscape architecture, so proportion, balance, and how forms live in a larger context are second nature. In dentistry I apply that at a smaller scale—designing smiles that t the whole face and the person behind it.

Q: You recommend more frequent cleanings than most insurance plans cover—why?

A: Twice-yearly cleanings are an insurance minimum, not a medical ideal. Seen quarterly, small issues are caught early—often solved with habits—before they become big llings, crowns, or root canals. Prevention works best when we see you more often.

Q: How do you frame oral health’s connection to overall health?

A: e mouth is a true gateway: infections in the gums can a ect the whole body, and research is exploring links between periodontal disease and conditions like Alzheimer’s. We teach habits because the downstream e ects are real.

photos by Sydney Hlavaty

ask an expert | lifestyle

AMADA CRUZ

THE SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART

In Santa Barbara, Amada Cruz is reshaping the museum visit into something lively, legible, and human. Her north star is simple: stay locally relevant while remaining globally visible, a stance that has guided a listening tour through town, bilingual signage in a 47% Latinx city, and galleries energized with color, surprise, and contemporary voices such as Elliott Hundley. e goal is engagement rather than reverence—spaces that speak plainly, stories that connect, scholarship that breathes. Cruz learned the value of radical clarity leading a major museum through COVID: you cannot over-communicate, you gather smart allies, and you stay exible—lessons that continue to shape how the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) invites people in.

ose invitations scale from classrooms to the international stage. Education now hums at the new Art Learning Lab in the old museum store space on State Street, with programs serving roughly 25,000 students and teachers and free Second Sundays for locals across three counties. In October, the museum welcomes Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art as the only West Coast venue. A companion show, Encore, tours SBMA’s own 19th-century French holdings—including four Monets— reframing familiar icons as the insurgent works they once were. e mix is the point: Paris via Santa Barbara, global art in local context, and a museum that feels like home.

Q: You mentioned activating static space in the museum, how do you achieve that?

A: Provide surprises in the galleries so visitors encounter the unexpected, and unabashedly embrace color—it injects energy without compromising scholarship.

Q: What do you feel makes a museum good—and what do you feel is a good museum?

A: I like museums that work hard to engage the viewer—not with lots of computers, but by really thinking about audiences and communicating through displays, text, and context. Museums are public spaces serving very di erent constituencies, so you take the audience into account and never talk down, even to kids; that’s what makes a museum successful.

Q: You mentioned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as an example of a “small town museum with global signi cance.” Is SBMA aiming for global visibility or a local mandate?

A: We strive to be locally relevant and globally visible—we really try to do both. For example, we’re the only West Coast venue for the upcoming French Impressionism show, which exempli es our position. And rather than just hosting that show, we’re pairing it with Encore, our own companion exhibition drawn from SBMA’s permanent holdings.

photo by Holli Margell

JOE SCHWEKE

BELROSE ESTATE JEWELERS

Belrose Estate Jewelers treats jewelry as living history, not merchandise. Founded by Joe’s parents on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1967 and now carried forward by Joe and his daughter Sarena, the gallery is known for a tightly edited trove of antique diamonds, vintage designer pieces, and singular high jewelry—each selected for beauty, provenance, and lasting wear. Sustainability isn’t a slogan here; by privileging heirlooms and one‑of‑a‑kind finds over new manufacturing, Belrose keeps extraordinary pieces in circulation and the stories attached to them alive. It’s a family lineage turned curatorial practice, refined across five decades and counting.

Since 2007 in Santa Barbara—where Joe relocated after years operating a successful Atlantic City gallery—Belrose’s expertise shows up in the details: a preference for old‑mine and old‑European cut diamonds that shimmer under a candlelight. Clients come to find “the one,” to repurpose unworn treasures, or to understand what they already own; Belrose appraises entire collections and helps families sell responsibly when it’s time to let go. The defining thread is character—the elusive fifth “C”— and the quiet promise that a great piece won’t just hold value, it will hold memory.

Q: Why focus on antique and estate pieces?

A: They’re timeless, sustainable, and unique—each one avoids new mining and offers character you won’t find in mass manufacturing.

Q: How are values shifting today?

A: Gold has surged, large colored stones are scarcer, and lab‑grown diamonds have increased the rarity—and desirability—of antique cuts.

Q: What makes antique diamonds different?

A: Old‑mine and old‑European cuts—only about 2% of diamonds in jewelry today—were hand‑cut on foot‑powered treadles, so they have broad, chunky fac ets and real personality.

WWW.BELROSEESTATE.COM

photo by Jeremy Diamond

SERVICES:

Life’s most important foundations need expert care—insurance, permitting, wealth, and fiduciary guidance. These professionals safeguard what we’ve built, and secure continuity for the future. With strategy, clarity, and trust, they manage complexity on our behalf, helping us navigate both everyday needs and long-term plans with confidence and peace of mind.

BRIAN KOHAN

KOHAN INSURANCE BROKERAGE

Kohan Insurance Brokerage isn’t your typical policy shop— it’s a broker-built conduit to the people who actually say yes. Founder Brian Kohan treats underwriting like a relationship sport, cultivating genuine partnerships with senior underwriters who take his calls when a generic portal would just return a decline. That advantage shows up in practice: a hardto-place industrial facility that others passed on got a quote because his underwriter took the call. The firm is building an in-house claims intake team and keeps a contracted public adjuster on speed dial—triaging coverage before a carrier gets notified, so clients aren’t penalized by unnecessary filings. In a hard market where exclusions creep in, Kohan’s blunt mantra is simple: disclose everything, fight for essentials like habitability on apartment policies, and never hide fees or weaker quotes. Though based in West Los Angeles, Kohan plays statewide and beyond, with a portfolio anchored in real estate (industrial, multifamily, office, shopping centers) and a fastgrowing roster of law firms that stack professional liability with EPLI, D&O, and group health. His brokerage thrives on strategy over sales, framing coverage as a long-term risk plan designed around how clients actually operate, not just whatever a system spits out. For Kohan, the work is about more than selling policies: it’s about being a trusted advisor who helps business owners protect what they’ve built and anticipate what’s ahead.

Q: What truly differentiates a broker from a captive agent?

A: Access and relationships. I can work across multiple carriers and speak directly with underwriters who know me—so borderline risks get real consideration instead of an automatic no.

Q: What’s the most important habit for anyone reviewing their policy?

A: Read the renewal line by line. Companies often sneak in exclusions people don’t notice until it’s too late. My job is to catch those and fight to keep the protections clients actually need.

Q: What’s your operating philosophy with clients?

A: Radical honesty. If someone else brings a better quote, I tell the client to take it. Long-term trust beats forcing a sale.

ask an expert | service

COURTNEY DESOTO, JD, CLPF

CHANNEL ISLANDS FIDUCIARY GROUP, INC.

For Courtney DeSoto, fiduciary work is about stepping into lives at their most complex and making sure every detail is handled with clarity and respect. As founder of Channel Islands Fiduciary Group, she oversees everything from finances and property sales to doctor’s visits and end-of-life decisions. She describes her role as that of a “professional adult child,” managing affairs with the same care and persistence a family member would bring—only with the added structure of licensing, legal oversight, and professional neutrality. Families turn to her when circumstances are too contentious, too distant, or simply too overwhelming to manage alone, and she brings not only order but also presence, often becoming the steady figure in the room when no one else is available.

The work sometimes veers into the unexpected, having DeSoto and her team rehome pets, sell coin collections, or navigate unusual assets alongside traditional estate planning. It’s all part of what she sees as the essence of fiduciary service: honoring the exact wishes of her clients with precision and care. Founded in 2014 after DeSoto spent years in public service as a probation officer and court investigator, Channel Islands Fiduciary Group offers a deeply human approach to an often-misunderstood profession. For DeSoto, the job is less about transactions than about trust, ensuring that every wish—whether financial, medical, or symbolic—is carried out exactly as intended.

Q: How do fiduciary services differ from what corporate trustees like banks provide?

A: Banks manage assets, but they don’t handle the personal side—healthcare decisions, daily care, being present at odd hours. We do all of that, with continuity and availability that corporate trustees just can’t match.

Q: What part of your work do you find most rewarding?

A: Spending time with clients at the end of their lives. Sometimes I’m the only visitor they have, and those conversations—about their lives, careers, marriages—are invaluable.

Q: What’s an unusual instruction you’ve honored?

A: Ensuring fresh flowers at a couple’s internment site for years—funded by the trust—because that mattered deeply to the client.

photos by Alison Helena

RICHARD MCWHORTER, CFP®, CRPC

SRM PRIVATE WEALTH

At SRM Private Wealth, wealth management unfolds as an intricate blend of nancial architecture and human navigation. e rm’s services range from constructing thoughtful, diversi ed portfolios to coordinating with accountants and attorneys, all while tending to the steady rhythm of clients’ dayto-day needs. Richard McWhorter describes the work as a constant calibration of probabilities, where market analysis is only one element, and the broader practice requires balancing strategy with lived realities. e team functions like a family o ce, emphasizing trust, judgment, and coordination across multiple disciplines to create a seamless experience for the families they advise. e underlying philosophy borrows from game theory as much as from economics. McWhorter is quick to frame investment decisions in terms of odds rather than absolutes, noting that even the strongest hand carries risk and must be hedged. Patience plays an equal role, since shifts in interest rates, markets, or policy require months before outcomes are clear. is theoretical backbone grounds a practice that prizes consistency, discipline, and thoughtful defense as much as growth. For SRM, the work is not about chasing certainty but managing uncertainty with clarity—an approach that turns nancial stewardship into an ongoing practice of measured judgment.

Q: What constant de nes your practice despite market shifts?

A: People. Markets might occupy 20-30% of my day. e rest is helping clients navigate daily events where nancial judgment matters just as much as investment strategy.

Q: How do you explain your approach to portfolio construction?

A: I think in probabilities. No one knows for sure where markets will go, so hedging becomes central— taking positions in di erent directions to protect against being wrong.

Q: You often use poker as an analogy for investing. What do you mean by that?

A: In poker, aces against twos win about 85% of the time, but that means you still lose 15%. It teaches that even the best hand isn’t a guarantee—you have to prepare for the 15%.

Q: How do you view the current economic environment?

A: I think the one thing we know is that change is constant. Economics is an inexact science—it’s maddening because there are so many variables. Everyone has a prediction, but nobody really knows. You’ve got to let time go by to actually see what happens.

photos by Chris Callahan Photography

CORBAN PAMPEL

GOLD COAST PERMITTING

Gold Coast Permitting is built for the reality of building in one of the toughest places to get a permit: the Central Coast and greater L.A. corridor. Founder Corban Pampel turned his own “there’s no one to hire, so I’ll learn it” moment into a nimble practice that spans everything from design review to full build permits—handling projects as small as a State Street awning in a historic district to multi‑building hotel renovations—and now works from Santa Barbara down to Pasadena. What sets the firm apart is tactical advocacy: a cordial, collaborative rapport with reviewers paired with clear eyed guidance for clients on what to do now, what to stage later, and when to stop debating city code and simply move forward. Pampel’s team plugs in anywhere a project needs momentum— early to de‑risk acquisitions for agents and flippers, or late to triage stalled submittals—and brings hard‑won strategies, like sizing ADUs under 800 square feet to skip design review and shave months off timelines. He’s also building a low‑cost self‑service portal for homeowners who can’t afford full representation, reflecting his conviction that a five‑minute call today can spare years of “permitting hell.” It’s a pragmatic, people‑first model: transparent with clients, respectful with the city, and relentlessly focused on keeping good projects moving.

Q: What’s the biggest permitting pitfall buyers miss when looking at houses?

A: Unpermitted work. Cities vary, and Santa Barbara doesn’t require a pre‑sale inspection, so you can inherit decades‑old additions that trigger enforcement and expensive af ter‑the‑fact permitting. Always compare the last permitted set to what’s on site.

Q: Where do projects lose the most time?

A: One‑month slips stack fast: missing documents, a designer and city debating code for weeks, or an architect who hasn’t responded since March. Clear sequencing and intentionality at every step save months.

Q: What’s your approach with city staff?

A: I don’t play bulldog. I let clients vent to me, then I keep it professional with reviewers. That respect—and a track record across dozens of submittals—helps keep borderline items moving instead of getting bounced.

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JACK WARNER ESTATE

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eXp Realty

DRE#: 01710544

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TORO CANYON ESTATE

REAL ESTATES

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Cristal Clarke (805) 886-9378

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE#: 00968247

HOME NEAR BUTTERFLY BEACH

892 Toro Canyon Road, Montecito

$11,995,000

Cristal Clarke (805) 886-9378

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE#: 00968247

This charming 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom home offers an unbeatable location just minutes to Montecito’s stunning Butterfly Beach, Coral Casino, and The Biltmore Four Seasons. The recently remodeled kitchen and spacious second-floor primary suite provide modern comfort and luxury.

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$6,495,000

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Sotheby’s International Realty DRE#: 01868263

REAL ESTATES

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PRIVATE MONTECITO LANE

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625 Parra Grande Lane, Montecito

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Randy Solakian Estates Group (805) 453-9642

Coldwell Banker Realty DRE#: 00622258

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Eucalyptus Hill neighborhood of Montecito

Please inquire for rates Paradise Retreats (805) 716-6059

DRE#: 02090892

Villa Caryatids is a luxurious private residence in Chora, Patmos, designed by renowned interior designer John Stefanidis. This five-bedroom, six-bathroom villa features panoramic terraces, a modern kitchen, and curated interiors. Located beneath the Monastery of St. John, it offers stunning views of the Icarian archipelago. Weekly rentals are available with a 15-day minimum stay.

Patmos, Greece Weekly rentals, 15-day minimum. villacaryatids.com

VILLA CARYATIDS

ESCAPE IN A MOMENT

Deeply rooted in the region’s fresh, ﬂavorful bounty, Ojai Valley Inn’s masterful chefs and seven original dining outlets have earned our iconic resort a stellar reputation for culinary excellence. From signature Italian-California ﬁne dining at the Forbes Five-Star Olivella to our one-of-a-kind epicurean experience, The Farmhouse, we invite you to escape in a moment you’ll savor always.

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