WELL-TIMED FOR the Bay Area’s Summer of Love 50th anniversary, change is in the air and perhaps also a design revolution.
Victorians are being infused with modernism; residential skyscrapers rising in San Francisco are opening new vistas; and artists’ neighborhoods have young tech entrepreneurs sinking roots.
To better reflect such demographic do-si-dos and new domiciles in San Francisco, the North Bay and the Wine Country, Marin At Home magazine will henceforth be called SPACES.
Under this new rubric, our publication comes with added sections. Focus, which will magnify a range of design subjects, picks as its first topic Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. It underlines the impact of the sharing spirit of the ’60s, as BAMPFA director Larry Rinder views it, on the tech world’s open source philosophy. The first of such shows about that pivotal period, Hippie Modernism precedes one at the de Young, located in Golden Gate Park, where 100,000 hippies famously converged for 1967’s Human Be-In. Another new column, Portfolio, highlights San Francisco sculptor Andy Vogt, who, unlike other artists, wasn’t displaced by rising rents. Ironically, he raids trash bins for his preferred medium: Victorian-era lath discarded from remodeled interiors. And our department In Bloom showcases flowering Southern Hemisphere plants that will weather climate change.
San Francisco, despite its morphing face, is still home to the arts: witness places like Swissnex on Pier 17; the relatively new Minnesota Street Project, an economically sustainable arts enterprise in the Dogpatch neighborhood; and artist David Ireland’s home on Capp Street, fully restored a year ago as an exhibition and event space and base for an artist-in-residency program. Ireland was involved in transforming army barracks into an arts nexus in the Marin Headlands during the 1980s (highlighted in this issue’s Rear Window). Voices features entrepreneur Chip Conley, a leader at both Burning Man and Airbnb, who during the 1980s started the city’s artful hotel chain Joie de Vivre, giving hospitality an unconventional frame.
Our features, collectively a time capsule of the changing milieu, run the gamut. Find artist Linda Cosgrove’s collection of baroque reliquaries in Marin; a century-old barn in Napa revitalized by architect William Duff for art collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky; a fine bookbinder’s atelier by architect Peter Pfau in Sausalito; and a sculpture garden in Tiburon by Surface Design for art collectors Stuart and Gina Peterson. In the East Bay, artist Christopher Brown shows us his decades-old live/work loft in Berkeley.
The cover story, about a young tech nabob’s four-story home in San Francisco’s Glen Park area, features a terraced garden by Sculpt and an interior by architect Cass Calder Smith, both sprinkled with artful touches and easy-to-sink-into furniture. With that as a cue, I looked for comfort at the Flexform showroom, where, thankfully, even new designs make you feel at home.
