Hasta La Ideas

Follow our journey through a bizarre world of hungry plants at North America’s largest carnivorous plant nursery

In our latest video we trekked out into the beautiful farmland outside Sebastopol, California to visit California Carnivores, North America’s largest carnivorous plant nursery. We spoke with founder Peter D’Amato about his personal history with these hungry plants, their cultural significance and what it takes to raise up fantastical plants from seed. Taking in the active plant life, we watched Venus Flytraps chowing down and a got a peak inside the stomach of an American Pitcher Plant.

Resurrecting Depression-era designs in California

Southern California’s Bauer Pottery Company first made a name for itself in 1932, when the company released California Color pottery after the Great Depression. Before its sunny introduction, ceramics came in white, cream or brown—Bauer was the first to liven up kitchenware with brighter options, at a time when the people most needed the boost in their homes. Today, Bauer is run by president Janek Boniecki, who revived the defunct pottery company and has since built a staff of 25 full-time employees, including his wife, Ruth Ammon, a television production designer responsible for the company’s LA showroom.

Boniecki, who oversees all aspects of the brand’s quest to recreate the vintage designs of the 1930s, describes the Bauer Pottery Company as “a family business…a happy place.” We caught up with him to discuss the company’s heritage and how it informs present and future.

How did you originally get into making pottery?

I started a candle business called the American Bee Company. Everything was poured into ceramic containers. I was always inspired by Bauer colors. Since the early ’80s, when I lived in San Diego, I have been collecting Bauer. When American Bee took off, I was a one-man show, and to this day I’ve made every candle.

I was contracting with small pottery companies making these candle pots for me, and we put out a little vase. I was trying to come up with a name for a pottery company. I went looking for how to register trademarks. One of the first ones I tried to get more information about was Bauer Pottery, to see how they registered their trademark. Well, it didn’t exist. I found out that when Bauer went out of business in 1962, their trademark eventually expired and became public domain. We registered as Bauer Pottery Company of Los Angeles. We published in 1998, got the approval and got the name. At first I still made everything myself.

How do you decide which Bauer designs to produce?

A lot of people think I own the original Bauer molds, but they were all destroyed. So we are constantly buying original pieces—I got two in this week that I won on eBay. Some people donate original Bauer pieces that came from that period. Last week a man called and said he had two beautiful old platters. We are working on one period: the early to late 30s. We’ll take a piece and make a model from that.

How do you make the model?

We make the model about eight to ten percent larger than the original. We make the model out of plaster then it will shrink down the right size. I have a very good model maker that can essentially copy the design. The Russell Wright line was the most difficult to do. It was really hard to get it to be as good or better than the original. It was a challenge with the different shapes.

From the model we then make the master mold and cast one or two off of the master mold to make sure we don’t want to change the thickness of the handle or the rings or improve upon it. If you are happy with the master mold, you make the permanent thing called the block and case. With the block and case you make the working dies or production molds. So the block and case is it. That’s the thing that is worth a thousand dollars plus. You treat it gingerly. It’s something you can use forever. We have two walk-in safes in the factory that have been there since the ’20s. We keep the blocking cases in there so they don’t get knocked around. Then we have them forever.

We started with the one little vase and I think we have about 150 styles in our catalogue now. So far all of the pottery has been manufactured in California. We ship pieces to more that twenty countries in Asia, Europe, and also all the way to Australia and New Zealand.

You have a collaboration with Sunset Magazine.

When I launched the company, a friend who works for Sunset Magazine caught wind of what I was doing. She asked me to send up some pieces. They published a small article in the December 1998 issue. We did not even have a website at that point. We got over 6,000 calls, just like that. We now have an ongoing collaboration with Sunset Magazine. It’s a license we have with them, Home By Sunset by Bauer.
We also hold licenses with Russel Wright, and the latest one we are working with is Sister Mary Corita and the Corita Art Center. LACMA is carrying her pieces in the gift shop at their Pacific Standard Time show, California Design, 1930-1965.

How did the Corita collaboration come about?

When Barack Obama was running for president, everyone was amazed by this man. His stump speech was pretty overwhelming at times. There were certain things he was saying. My wife has given me a serigraph of Corita as a birthday gift. It was a Yes Thank You—a beautiful piece. Then I bought the book and I looking thought the book of all her work and I thought, “this sounds like Barack Obama.” Hope. Yes We Can. We Believe. I thought, we have this factory and we do decaling and decorating, maybe we can make some mugs with her work. At the time the foundation was not interested in putting anything out commercially, but we kept in touch. Then when the Pacific Standard Time show at LACMA came along and they were going to be exhibited in it, they approached me and said, “We’d like to do something.” Corita’s work is exhibited in more that fifty museums around the country. We started with the mugs and vases in time for the show. We have access to the whole collection and submit each piece we’d like to make approved. LACMA has become our biggest customer. They are selling hundreds of pieces a week right now.

Bauer Pottery is available on their website, in store throughout the world and at their monthly Los Angeles showroom sales.

Yoram Wolberger debuts his first public installation in a San Francsico high-rise

Decorating the foyer of San Francisco’s new ultra-luxe high rise Millennium Tower, Yoram Wolberger‘s “CA Mission” depicts California’s iconic Spanish missions in an 18′ x 14′ model. The nod to the state’s former architects plays off of notions of mass production and cookie-cutter repetition with a body made from translucent fiberglass, laid out with artifacts and imperfections to resemble a ready-to-assemble child’s toy.

CA Mission continues his interest in toys and domestic objects, although the scale of this piece is notably more ambitious. His past work has included trophy figures and “Cowboys and Indians”, a series of life-size figurines representing Wild West characters. Wolberger shows an interest in addressing the uncomfortable racial and ethnic past of California, especially as it relates to childhood education. The reproduction is accurate even in its imperfections, which collectively break the mythical romance that colors the state’s history.

The Millennium Tower’s location on Mission Street obviously informs Wolberger’s choice for the installation, which marks his first public commission. The city’s largest residential development will build the rest of their collection with work from other artists with ties to Bay Area art schools and institutions.

The Millenium Tower

301 Mission Street

San Francisco, CA 94105

Our tour of the ingredient-driven artisanal California distillery

The building that houses St. George Spirits in Alameda, CA may look like a naval air hangar on the outside, but inside lies a vast warren of copper pot stills and casks filled with artisanal spirits. St. George was founded in 1982 to make eau de vie fruit brandies, and the process of making handcrafted eau de vie continues to influence their development of other spirits. Since its inception, the distillery has evolved into a comprehensive operation making whiskey, gin, rum, Qi Tea Liqueurs, and is even developing an aged balsamic vinegar.

Master distiller Lance Winters has been on a 16-year journey to make magic at St. George, and he describes his work as if he were tinkering away in some kind of fantastical workshop. With no shortage of projects on hand, Winters is currently planning a move to a much larger laboratory and is working on the release of a single malt whisky with a special bottling from a single barrel later this year, in celebration of their 30th anniversary. In about two years, Winters’ organic corn rye whiskey and California bourbon will be ready for release. We caught up with Winters to get a tour and hear more about his successful passion.

What are you working on in here in your lab?

This is where most of our projects start. I run individual botanicals through one of these small stills to be able to see how it is going to express itself. I have one friend who is growing organic rye up by Mt. Shasta. We have brought down some of that rye, mashed it in here, fermented it and distilled it in the stills and it’s lovely. I also decided to make bourbon. Bourbon is a lot of fun because you have so much latitude to play around with the grain bill. It’s like making chocolate or coffee—bringing out different characteristics when you roast the grain.

How did the idea for your Breaking & Entering Bourbon bottling come about?

Dave Smith is responsible for putting together our whiskey for bottling. He goes through and smells and tastes everything we’ve got and determines what is going to go into a given bottling. He is so good at it, I thought, what if he had access to a bunch of bourbon barrels? What could he do? So we went to a bunch of different bourbon distilleries. We brought 320 barrels back with us. It took him about three months to taste from all of them. He made notes and decided how they would best be blended together to be able to make a “super bourbon”—a Compass Box style of American bourbon. I think Compass Box is fantastic. We bottled ours under the name Breaking & Entering. We were careful to let people know that we did not make this, but we blended it. We love it.

You are aging balsamic vinegar too?

This balsamic vinegar has been aging for 14 years. It’s thick and syrupy. There is no way to short-circuit this process. I want to learn how to blow glass and make my own bottles.

How did you develop your three gins? (Terroir, Botanivore, and Dry Rye Gin)

Five years ago I started talking about how much in love I am with the parklands around here. My son was going to a day camp. I’d pick him up in the afternoons and the smell was pine trees and wild fennel, bay laurel, and dirt. I love that smell of the earth between the dry dusty component and the decomposing mulch of the woodlands. I thought that would be something really great to distill, but then I shelved the idea. A couple of years later, I started thinking about making a gin with the flavors and smells of the forest. They all have an affinity for some traditional part if the gin profile. If you’ve hiked Mt. Tamalpais you will recognize the profile. We bring in Douglas fir and infuse it in high proof alcohol. We have been drawing it off and taking that liquid and putting it in the stills. It tastes like a sweet Christmas tree.

We also make a gin called Botanivore, a very broad, beautiful refreshing style of gin designed for tropical climates that is great for gin and tonics. As soon as you throw a little tonic in there, the dill seed in it explodes making it very green and herbaceous. It’s really good in a martini too.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the one we start with a pot-distilled rye. It’s like a rye whiskey that hasn’t touched a barrel yet. Rye already has a lovely peppery nature to it that helps bump up some of the juniper berry qualities. We use 50% more juniper berries and crack them open to get more surface area. We add black peppercorns, caraway seed, lime and grapefruit peel. It’s my favorite cocktail base for a Negroni or to treat is as a rye in an Old Fashioned.

So are your spirits for cocktail geeks?

Our customers don’t need to be experts, they just need to know what they like and what makes their palette tingle. We need to be experts at what we like and that’s basically where everything starts. We’ve been able to find enough people who think like us to keep us going.

Buddhas, lips and turtles abound in a California chocolatier

While walking along the shady tiled walkways to the quaint shops of La Arcada in Santa Barbara, a peek inside Chocolats du CaliBressan reveals a candy case filled with tiny turtles, ruby lips, glistening buddhas and classic truffle spheres.

After studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Pâtisserie, Chocolatier Jean-Michel Carré moved to California with his wife (who was originally from the Santa Barbara area) to focus his career on his love of chocolate. Now at Chocolat du Cali Bressan in Carpinteria and downtown Santa Barbara, Carré spends his days making ultra-rich handmade truffles and bon bons.

Among the store’s most popular items are the French Bisous—red lips made with dark and milk ganache chocolate with tangerine—and the Buddha Beauty, a truffle amulet filled with soft salted caramel that comes with instructions to lick his belly for good luck. Influenced by 30 years in the kitchens of restaurants in France, Switzerland and the U.K., each day the self-professed “passionate chocolatier” can be found experimenting with surprising ingredients like avocado, curry, Sichuan pepper, balsamic vinegar and lotus—a special request of the local estate and public garden Lotusland.

If we had to pick a favorite, it would be the La Arcada Turtle with cajeta, Mexican milk caramel—it was almost too cute to eat, but after biting off the tasty little legs of the shiny green treat, an intense craving for more took over. Time to plan another visit very soon. Chocolats du CaliBressan’s La Arcada location is located at 1114 State Street, #2; there’s also a store at 4193 Carpinteria Avenue, Suite 4 in Carpinteria, CA.