Ground Condition

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles for the Center for Craft’s annual board retreat. In between studio visits—including one to Sarah Rosalena’s loft space in the garment district, with a peek at her LC2 digital jacquard loom that’s “bringing fiber art into the future”—I squeezed in a girlfriends’ dinner at JAR, a visit to the Studio Ford showroom, and a once-in-a-lifetime tour of architect Ray Kappe’s house in Rustic Canyon, which recently went on the market.

Hi and welcome! A note of introduction for any new readers who may have arrived here via a really lovely Cup of Jo feature a few weeks ago. I’m a longtime writer and editor on design and architecture, known for having feelings about buildings. My job used to be visiting people’s amazing homes all over the world, and I am still interiors-obsessed. I live in California with my husband and two small daughters, and we built a sauna from the ground up in our Berkeley backyard this summer.

Earlier this year, my husband and I launched into a backyard project: overhauling what I’d been affectionately calling “the Grey Gardens of the West Coast.” The goal was an outdoor room to spend time in, if you will, in place of the shaggy, wild hillscape best viewed at a distance.

This issue is a quick one, in between SAUNA MONTH dispatches. Next week I’ll finally be sharing the details on just how far down the rabbithole I went when my husband and I decided to build a sauna, from the ground up, in our backyard. Unrelated to theme months, I have a request for you, dear readers: A couple of years back, I became well and truly obsessed with documenting house numbers.

Today is a special edition of Ground Condition featuring Sami Reiss, a New York-design-writer-by-way of Ottawa with a rabid newsletter following of his own.

Five years in, I’m becoming more Californian by the month—as evidenced by my extremely laidback newsletter schedule and a vacation state of mind* that’s stretching well into September. So for this issue, I thought I’d double down on the West Coast design report: my local hotspots, a favorite new house at the Sea Ranch, and all the dirt (well, clay) on my recent collab with Northern California’s own Heath Ceramics for Herman Miller.

A few weeks ago, during the ultramarathon that is New York “design week month,” I had the pleasure of joining LinYee Yuan, David Michon of FOR_SCALE, and Jean and Madeleine from Colonydesign gallery for a panel at the newly minted Shelter fair. And that panel—discussing the future of design media—has been a jumper cable to many of my IRL conversations since then.

header here I’m guessing I’m not alone in that, during an especially distressing era for news, I alternate between googling “global talent visa 3-year UK” and scratching the mental itch to do something crafty, productive, or mindless with my hands.

Everyone has a house they’re obsessed with. This phenomenon is very much not limited to architecture people, or design writers, or erstwhile shelter magazine types— it is simply a statement of fact. It might be a derelict house under a blanket of ivy in an otherwise-manicured neighborhood, or one of the 20th century’s masterpieces of domestic architecture.

I am famously behind the zeitgeist when it comes to mainlining movies and television, so forgive me if this feels like yesterday’s news. (In the case of The Brutalist, literally yesterday.) But I was chatting with my pal Eric Petschek, one of the sharpest-eyed, hardest-working photographers today, on the topic of the former Bell Labs in New Jersey and we had a few things to say.