Monthly Archives: May 2011

THIRTY THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE DESERT FLOOR

It’s a great time of year to visit my favorite store, RTH of Los Angeles. Ol’ Rene has some new and beautiful things in for summer. Stop by when you get a chance.        537 North La Cienega.

THIS IS NOT AMERICA

CATCH OF THE DAY

The most difficult task was to find a way for people to inhabit this magnificent and natural system in numbers without destroying the very reason for people to come here. As I thought about how to resolve this issue, a multitude of images came flooding in on me of wonderful places I’d seen in other parts of the world.  I thought of the great hill towns of Italy, of the clusters of stone farm buildings in the Chianti region of Tuscany. I remembered wandering amongst the beautiful thatched roofed farm houses of Japan and the similarities between them and the Swiss chalets on the flanks of the Jungfraujoch. I thought as well of the charming early colonial towns of New England.

All of these wonderful places had a certain character, an organic wholeness, an almost mystical one-ness with the earth out of which the seemed to have grown. They all were of a piece, they exuded simplicity, they all nestled into the ground and had a similarity of materials which linked them together into a whole, they all breathed together and seemed to live together easily and naturally. Perhaps the most memorable feature of all of these hauntingly beautiful places was that the whole place, rather than any one building or house, had a memorable and unified personality.

MADE HERE

Thanks to Will Welch and GQ for the piece on Made Here. Read it here.

MARLINSPIKE CHANDLERY

MADE HERE –  a project I’ve been working on at Levi’s that focuses on craftspeople who put beautiful things into the world – has launched! You can find a new blog online at levi.com and the goods at Levis neighborhood stores in Malibu, the Meatpacking district, and on Newbury Street in Boston. Above is the first of the videos on these special folks, this one featuring Tim Whitten of Stonington, Maine. I recently went Down East to visit Tim at his shop Marlinspike Chandlery and watched him make one of his beautiful beach stone necklaces. The nice guys of Bon Iver let us use a song that’s a perfect fit.