Postcard from New York

Our home away from home. West 86th Street.

I’ve been to New York twice in two months for industry events. Christmas is always a magical time because of the lights, ice skating, and window displays. My favorite windows are Bergdorf’s; one of those rare moments where creativity and commerce come together to create delight.






Windows at Bergdorf's

It often rains at that time of year, and we did get drenched after the Interior Design Hall of Fame gala. Because of this event, I associate the Waldorf with Christmas. The food isn’t very good, but the work of the Hall of Fame designers is always interesting, and it’s good to see old friends. Annie Block was in Norma Kamali (her high school prom dress, natch), and we spied Edie Cohen the next night at the Guggenheim Best of Year Awards event in an exquisite Balenciaga. We never made it into the round auditorium, because we were too busy catching up with writer Raul Barreneche, who we haven’t seen in a few years. He has branched out into design. (Nothing to see on his website just yet.)

Back in late January for the other big event, the Contract Interiors Breakfast at Cipriani. A lot of the same people attend both events, but the two always feel different. Perhaps people are less guarded at 7:30 in the morning. The good schmoozing takes place early, so it’s not a good idea to be late. Despite the wretched economy, over 500 folks showed up. Contract Editor in Chief Jennifer Busch looked great in her custom outfit by Jean Lin (www.dressedinyellow.com). This year’s Designer of the Year was Graft from Los Angeles, which provided an excellent contrast to the legacy award recipient, Art Gensler. Old Global and New Global. Thankfully, Art knows how to be brief. The award-winning design projects were fantastic, but the music on the video was just weird. One commentator said it reminded him of high holy days. Former Designers of the Year showing their SF roots included Mark Harbick and last year’s recipients, John Peterson and John Cary of Public Architecture.


Ms Busch at the Contract Breakfast


Industry Leaders gather at the Contract Breakfast including (l to r) Cheryl Durst, ED of IIDA, Katie Weeks, Editor in Chief of EcoStructure and former Designer of the Year and Man About Town Mark Harbick


Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander gossiping with Katie Weeks at 8:00 am!


What does Diana Mosher have in that handbag?


Steven Betts Art Director Extraordinare, Katie Weeks, and Yosh Asato

Favored restaurants are still packed. We tried Danny Meyer’s new place in the Gramercy Park Hotel, Maialino.


Gramercy Park


The breads at Maialino


Inside Maialino

The first venture in the renovated hotel failed, but this one seems likely to succeed. The understated design (Rockwell has taken a more minimal turn!) is the right backdrop for excellent fresh Italian cuisine. The servings are not large, but the quality of the ingredients is fantastic. The bar looks out to the park and is a great spot if you want to dine solo or don’t have a reservation. Danny Meyer was walking around greeting guests and keeping an eye on things, including adjusting our curtain when the sun got too bright. See ArchNewsNow (www.ArchNewsNow.com) editor Kristen Richards in sunglasses.


Kristen before the shades went down

Of course, everybody is asking about Architectural Record and the AIA contract, which was transferred to Architect (and its publisher Hanley Wood). We chatted with Record editor Bob Ivy, who feels genuinely confident that the magazine’s circulation numbers will stay up. Given what I’ve heard about declining membership at the AIA, this makes sense. I actually think the change means that we may have two stronger architecture-oriented magazines. On top of this, of course, The Architect’s Newspaper has just started a Midwest edition, in addition to its East Coast and West Coast ones.

Everybody seems to agree that the future depends on how print publications embrace the Web, but I’m not sure anybody’s got it figured out. Young freelancer (and former I.D. staffer) William Bostwick has been recruited to begin writing for a regular online design publication for Fast Company. Former Metropolis Web Maven Randi Greenberg is writing about design for AOL and Anne Guiney, alumnus of Metropolis, Architecture, and The Architect’s Newspaper, has taken over the Institute for Urban Design. And of course Katie Weeks moved to Washington to take over eco-structure. A lot of changes!

We stopped by the relatively new Ace Hotel, which has a NY funk attitude, but unlike most hotels, it has loads of room to hang out in the lobby, which feels a bit like an old library with bar service. There’s the requisite photo booth. The hotel’s restaurant, Breslin, is popular because it’s dark and serves the best French fries. (Since the vibe is faux English, they call them chips.)


The Ace Hotel


The Ace Hotel


The library table in the lobby of the Ace Hotel

Ralph Pucci had an opening for most of the design commune (www.ralphpucci.net) at his enormous gallery. In the penthouse were the blue chippers with the Jens Risom furniture and the Deborah Turbeville prints. But down on the ninth floor, furniture designer and architect Rob Bristow and his wife Pilar Proffitt held forth. Their custom pieces aren’t cheap, but you won’t ever want to replace them—they are timeless. They have branched out beyond wood and made some exquisite metal pieces. They even got covered in the New York Times last week. We ran into Susan Victoria, formerly of Metropolitan Home, Fred Bernstein, PR maven Liz Kubany, and the young gallery duo Jay Horowitz and Sally Oberbeck of Morgan Lehman (www.morganlehmangallery.com). (Rob and Pilar designed their gallery in Chelsea.) The designers responsible for Facebook’s new offices, Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander (www.o-plus-a.com), found their way to East 18th Street all the way from San Francisco. Pucci’s old-fashioned PR lady kept telling everybody there were no photos allowed, and all the bloggers looked at her like she was mad and went on taking pictures. It was a great party.


Jay Horowitz and Sally Oberbeck at Ralph Pucci


Rob Bristow and Pilar Proffitt being interviewed at their Ralph Pucci opening

After the opening, we ventured out to Brooklyn to see Andrew Blum. Seems like nobody lives in Manhattan anymore. Most of the writers, editors, and architects live in Brooklyn these days! Andrew is writing a book about the actual bricks and mortar of the Internet (advance and everything!) and is making a film with his wife Davina based on the Princeton Architectural Press book entitled Minka. Check out the trailer at www.vimeo.com/5394397.

Snow began falling on Thursday. Children were mesmerized. They refused to ride in their strollers and stood up on the backs instead, sticking their tongues out trying to catch snowflakes. The garbage at the curb was covered in an even pale frosting. Despite the traffic, the city seemed much quieter, as if a moment of reflection fell over the metropolis. Like another chance.


Snow makes even the garbage look better


One of my favorite subway murals (Roy Lichtenstein)

Remains of Religion: Fenton Johnson and Miscellaneous Notes on Faith

Last year, my sister converted to Judaism. We grew up nominally Unitarian. The other day, I was on the phone with my friend Al, and we talked a little about why so many local Buddhists still identify as Jewish. I mentioned that it might be because there was room for both to coexist in the same person. The theme of multiple faiths keeps coming up.

One of the holiday letters we received in December came from a former Episcopal priest condemning organized religion. Given the continuous news of bombings and betrayals, I understand how he got there. But still, I was a bit surprised. With all the violence rooted in religious advocacy, it is hard to argue for religion as a basis for faith and peace. Did Jesus even intend for an organized religion to follow him? Did Buddha? I have witnessed people gain strength from faith, but where does faith begin? Does it need organized religion? A place to hold and practice it? Apparently, the architecture of the churches of Rome initially drew Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, to Catholicism. Given the way I look at the world, perhaps the best thing that religions give us are the buildings. Nobody knows your silent prayer in a cathedral, temple, or zendo. That’s part of the beauty. You own your own moment.

Over the holidays while we were traveling, I had the chance to read Fenton Johnson’s book Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, published in 2003. I had sat next to the author at a San Francisco Public Library dinner in the late 1990s. I remember the date because my mother had just been placed in assisted living and I was struggling with what I thought was best for her. Often I found myself asking for guidance—I wouldn’t have thought to characterize it as prayer.


Fenton Johnson

I had read one of Johnson’s novels and his memoir and enjoyed his work. I must have asked him about his next book, because we got to talking about Thomas Merton and his monastery and the local Buddhist monasteries. Merton died by accident in 1968 in Bangkok following a lecture; he never saw his gesture to the East come to fruition. Johnson spoke about growing up near Merton’s monastery, Gethsemani Abbey, in rural Kentucky, and how the monks came to his home, drank, and danced on the table. We also chatted about the San Francisco Zen Center, a different kind of religious retreat a few blocks away. At the time, I was interested in Zen Buddhism. I had sat zazen at the Berkeley Zen Center and Green Gulch. I had read about Merton but understood very little of his tradition or that of the Buddhists. I just liked my imagined aesthetic idea of them. But I was very interested that someone was going to try and write about these two monastic traditions together and perhaps fulfill some aspect of Merton’s reach.

After our dinner, I forgot to stay on the lookout for the finished work. Last fall, during one of those moments at the end of the workday when I look for old high school friends on the Internet, I thought of that chance meeting and found that Johnson had finished his book six years ago.

My passing interest in both Merton and Zen was rooted in aesthetics and frustration. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to Japanese structures and simple emotional answers to impossible questions. As a kid, I didn’t know that the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park was kitschy. It felt like a calm place where my mother and I could share cups of tea and unusual snacks overlooking a little pond and forget troubles at home. I would walk around the gift shop and imagine what it would be like to live there.


Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park

I must have first heard about Merton when I was a teenager. He looked like an authentic seeker who had some handle on truth. When I saw a photo of his concrete block hermitage many years later, I was disappointed that it wasn’t more beautifully designed. I liked my fantasy of a place to contemplate, not the reality. That was some of the baggage I brought to Johnson’s book. Maybe he could reconcile my ill-informed fantasies.

Johnson’s book begins in 1996, when there was a meeting at Gethsemani Abbey that the Dalai Lama attended. Reading the book requires work; it’s not an easy read. There are three strands: his experiences as a guest at Gethsemani and the San Francisco Zen Center monasteries; a history of monasticism, mostly Christian; and his own journey of faith. Interestingly, the two religious traditions he explores share a similar design aesthetic – at least in their sanctuaries. The chapel at Gethsemani is spare, almost Japanese, as Johnson notes. Of course, the various zendos at Green Gulch and Tassajara are informed by the temples in Japan. This was my own attraction to Buddhism, through the aesthetic door, as it were. My most memorable sitting was in a small zendo in Santa Fe where a friend took me for a two-hour meditation one evening. The structure combined the local adobe building style with Japanese traditions. You don’t begin to see what goes into adobe until you look at a piece of it for two hours. I never saw the night sky so clearly as when we emerged, as if a giant bamboo tea whisk had cleared out my head.


Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in central Kentucky


Gethsemani sanctuary


Gethsemani hermitage


Green Gulch zendo


Tassajara zendo

Johnson excels at the personal narrative (this is true in his memoir, Geography of the Heart, as well). At times his well-researched history of monasticism drags a bit. But his own struggle with faith and how Buddhism and Catholicism conflict and eventually refract each other is earnest, at times stumbling, and finally illuminating. The Dalai Lama has said that there is no need for people to convert to Buddhism; they should meditate within the context of their own religion. In that way, the Dalai Lama offers a path when the original religion, in the case of Johnson and millions of other Catholics, damns you and no longer offers faith. Combined traditions can mean a way forward, and Johnson follows that path. In sitting with the Buddhists, Johnson is able to return to the core of his Christian faith. He writes about Jesus’s teachings and begins to let go of his considerable anger at the oppression coming from Rome. He favors drama, art, and the pursuit of the divine, and reminds us that each individual has to find a path that makes sense. Indeed, it is often the institution and its tendency to perpetuate itself that gets in the way.

Any journey towards faith is difficult to document. If it delves into arcane details of doctrine, it will feel academic and impersonal. But too much of the personal can feel self indulgent or solipsistic. Johnson should be recognized for his courage to reveal a deeply personal journey in a balanced and engaging way. He can be forgiven for the tedious bits – after all, he did a lot of historic research. As he tells us, faith is not the endpoint, it is a process. Although he is keenly sensitive to the environments and what they offer, his search transcends the physical reality of stone and timber. The building can shelter the searcher, even inspire a quest for faith, but it is not really faith itself.

Links
Gesthemani: www.monks.org
SF Zen Center: www.sfzc.org
Fenton Johnson's website: www.fentonjohnson.com
Fenton Johnson's talk on you tube

Designer and Teacher Closes His Store on Union Street

My friend and frequent collaborator David Wakely told me that after 45 years, interior designer John Wheatman has retired and closed his shop at 1933 Union Street. I first saw his shop when I was a young teenager exploring Union Street with my family in the early 70s. I think of that era as Union Street’s greatest moment, when there were exquisite antique stores, street cafes, and a brand new bistro named Perry’s. For the next forty plus years, you could depend on a decent hamburger at Perry’s and beautiful design at John Wheatman’s.






All photos by David Wakely

I moved to San Francisco in 1977 and began working in a restaurant on Union Street. I would often arrive early so I could go down the street and walk through the shop and marvel at the placement, selection, and of course, prices. Back then, a thin little man with a thin little bow tie watched over the store and always treated me respectfully, as if I could afford to purchase the finely tailored furniture. Eventually, the store expanded across the garden courtyard and upstairs. Each turn, niche, and room combination was worth studying. Nothing was placed carelessly or with haste. A three-dimensional haiku. Sometimes on Saturday morning, you could spy him moving furniture around before the shop opened.

Wheatman was an old-time decorator who sold at retail and drew customers in with the shop. It is hard to imagine him without the storefront to explain his ideas, to share the evidence of his thinking. I think of his store, along with the national chain Design/Research, as my education in design. Wheatman loved neutrals, Asian antiques, modern art, all before combining them became fashionable. He could add a new piece to his repertoire or even paint a room red, but restraint was Wheatman’s comfort zone. People brought a room to life. He was crafting a perfect background – sometimes for three generations of the same family. Although he was a man of rarefied tastes (even his samples were hauled around in an old oversized Hermes bag), he understood that many people could not afford bespoke interiors and reached out by teaching interior design at UC Extension. He didn’t need the money – he wanted to share beauty with more people. One of his classes was called “Decorating on a Limited Budget.” And he meant it.








All photos by David Wakely

He felt that design was possible within almost any means. To further extend his experiences beyond his clientele, he began collaborating with David Wakely and his wife Sharon Smith on a book that would capture his thinking. They brought me in at the earliest stages to see if I could help with the text. I treasure those days interviewing John in his office and listening to his funny stories. Family and job pulled me away from the project, and writer Barbara Stevenson took over and worked with John beautifully. The first book, Meditations on Design: Reinventing Your Home with Style and Simplicity, was published in 2000. John had a lot more to share, and the same team created another book, entitled A Good House Is Never Done, in 2002. I went to the launch party for the second book, and in a few seconds John drew a sketch on the title page while he talked with various guests. It looks a great deal like my living room today. He was a great inspiration and teacher.






All photos by David Wakely

The other day I was having lunch with David and Sharon, and it turned out John and another friend were at the next table. I had not seen him in many years, but he was as courtly as ever. We both finished at the same time. John stood, still taller than any of us, in a beautifully tailored suit. Using his long slender fingers, he picked up my modest cotton jacket and held it for me to put on. In that moment, while design was his passion, it was the people he touched that really mattered.


Wheatman's storefront. All photos by David Wakely

Faith and Design

I launched this blog about a year ago because I was turning 50 and wanted to share what I was interested in. My father had his first heart attack at 50 and nearly died. So death and faith have been in my thoughts.

A few people have told me that they are surprised that my blog is about faith and design. Design, sure—I’ve been interested in buildings, furniture, and cities since I was a little boy. But faith? My friends don’t mean to suggest that I am a heretic, but they do know that I am irreverent, not exactly beatific, and generally agnostic.

Faith—by that I mean faith commonly associated with religion—has to do with the transcendent, something unknowable beyond ourselves. And yet so much discourse about religion is quite personal, often psychological. This is something that Dorothy Day spoke about: the idea of serving others without any anticipated reward. In the Jewish faith, the tahara, the washing of the deceased, is considered a great deed because the person being served cannot express appreciation. That is an aspect of faith that interests yet eludes me.

We have friends who are strident atheists, and Paul subscribes to a newsletter called “Freedom From Religion.” I think of it as freedom from the folks who decide their faith is the right faith. But how can faith be comprehended without some structure? How can one person make sense of an entirely blank page?

Faith may be most effective when practiced in solitude or a small community so that institutional self-perpetuation does not take hold and interfere. Herein lies one conflict for me. I don’t necessarily want the organizational infrastructure, but I do enjoy the buildings.

Since I am not a regular member of any faith community, I often pray or meditate when I am swimming or in the shower. This year I visited two religious structures that had water in common. The Catholic Cathedral of Christ the Light (2008) by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) sits on the edge of Lake Merritt in Oakland. The architects sited the church so that water’s reflection can influence the light on the interior, but the vista of the shimmering lake is seen as one exits the doors and looks out, not from within the sanctuary. We watched it being built outside our window. They started with the compression ring at the top, placed the tall wood ribs, and then glazed it all. (A visual timeline can be seen at www.ctlcathedral.org.) Craig Hartman, design partner at SOM, integrated a lot of symbolism into the seemingly abstract sculpture. The main focus is on the light. How Hartman and his team at SOM filter the light defines the experience within. The extensive use of wood relates to stories from the bible as well a shared idea of inhabitation. However, there are more direct biblical influences to be found as well. The geometric structure of the sanctuary is created with the intersection of two arcs. In the plan of the cathedral, the Vesica Pisces form is visible. (It looks rather different in plan than on the back of a car.)








Oakland Cathedral photos by Cesar Rubio

In addition to the complex geometries that create this marvelous space there is the Omega Window, which transforms an image of Christ from Chartres Cathedral. At first, some people think this image is a hologram or pixilated image. Although it took a great deal of technology to create the image on perforated metal, Christ himself is just light and shadow.

Some large churches, like Pietro Belluschi’s and Pier Luigi Nervi’s St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, inspire awe but also intimidate. (Although I love Richard Lippold’s baldacchino). At Christ the Light, I felt awe, shaped in part by the beautiful wood interior structure, the ethereal image of Jesus, and the enveloping light. But the gentle geometry allows the individual to relate to the immediate community of worshipers. My eye returned to the pews, to the people around me. There is an intimacy on the ground.

The other religious building that moved me deeply in the last year was Eero Saarinen’s nondenominational chapel at MIT in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston. A perfect cylinder built of ragged brick reminds me of that Buddhist saying that only God is perfect. The curving form stands on a few piers in a shallow reflecting pool. Inside the cool, dark space, the walls undulate, and the pattern of the water dances up on the walls. In the center, a shimmering metal screen, by Harry Bertoia, encircles the simple marble altar. A small circle of light from the ceiling illuminates the marble and reflects on the small pieces of bronze. They look so delicate, so fragile, but they are not broken, they endure. It was a perfect place to pray for a few minutes.











Recently I returned to the Unitarian Church in Kensington, California, designed by Wurster & Bernardi (Emmons was not a partner at the time). They brought hints of the mission style, Asian architecture, and the eclecticism of Bernard Maybeck (who donated the land) into a simple and inspiring structure that feels much the same as it did when I was growing up a block away. The water fountain centers the atrium. I was pleased to see the parking lot and sanctuary full. This is where I first felt the possibility of church architecture. In a religious structure the architect has to satisfy the congregation’s program but also find something ambiguous, unknowable.



Earlier this summer in Provincetown, I sat by myself under an umbrella on a folding chair looking out at the Atlantic and the long empty beach at the end of Cape Cod and thought, this might be the perfect church. Maybe it’s the water.

Interview with Robert Holgate

Holgate Residence, San Francisco, CA Photo: JD Peterson

A few years ago, I met an interior designer who wasn’t obsessed with fancy labels or excess, who – to borrow a phrase from Charles Eames – took his pleasures seriously. He talked about the meditative practice of moving objects around until they found their rightful place. He loved the spare beauty of a Platner chair as much as the mysterious depth of a Fortuny fabric. We sat down in his apartment overlooking Buena Vista Park to talk about the links between design and faith.

Q: When did you first know that you were interested in something related to design?

Robert Holgate: I grew up in Big Piney, Wyoming, so there wasn’t a context for design that I understood. But I knew there were some issues when I wouldn’t wear anything but corduroys until I was in high school. I drove my mom crazy. I was really particular about what I wore, and I designed my room and had this pattern painted around the room that was interesting for that era. It was orange and yellow and brown with stripes going around and coming to a point: very modern. But I don’t think I really understood that design was what I was meant to do until I started selling women’s clothes and then worked for Sue Fisher King.

Q: Did you go to church in Big Piney?

Holgate: My mom and dad weren’t big about them going to church, but my mom was pretty adamant that my brother and I go to church. It was a little Episcopal church in Big Piney; I think there were maybe 15 or 20 in church. But I was the altar boy and helped with services and stuff. I didn’t have a happy childhood, so I think I kind of used church as an escape.

Q: Did you rebel at some point, or did you just grow up and move away?

Holgate: I think by the time I got into high school, I stopped going to church so much. I didn’t rebel until I understood how evil it really is. I don’t think spirituality has that much to do with religion. The church is missing compassion. They’re riddled with judgment.

Q: So, what was the path to get to San Francisco from Big Piney? It seems a long way. You couldn’t make that name up.

Holgate: I always wanted to go to a city. I loved going to cities. My mom had to go to the doctor fairly often, and the closest doctor was in Salt Lake City, which was a four-hour drive, about 250 miles. So every time she’d have to go to the doctor, I’d beg to go. The day I graduated from high school, I loaded my car up and moved to Salt Lake City and started school there.

Q: What were you studying?

Holgate: I planned on becoming an operating room technician, because I thought they made good money. But I got in the operating room and passed out when they started cutting people open.

Q: How did you react to it being so Mormon?

Holgate: I didn’t really care that much about it, because to me it was a big city, and I loved that. I loved the variety and the fact that there were gay people there. But I didn’t come out until I’d been in Salt Lake maybe four or five years.

Q: When did you go to school?

Holgate: Needless to say, I didn’t finish school in Salt Lake City. When I came here, I went to the hotel restaurant program at City College. I worked in hotels and restaurants, and then I met Douglas Durkin. It was fun being with him. I realized then that I loved this stuff. At the time, Sue Fisher King was looking for somebody to run her store at Wilkes Bashford. Just before that, I had sold women’s clothes, and I did really really well. She recruited me to run her store at Wilkes Bashford, and that’s how I got into doing homes. People would come into Wilkes and say, “Will you come look at my kitchen? Come look at my dining room and see what kind of table stuff I need.” And eventually, people started coming in and saying, “We bought a new house, will you just come down and look at it?”

Q: How did you handle both?

Holgate: I had four clients when I was still running the home store at Wilkes Bashford. But it was crazy because I was working nights and weekends. I decided to quit when Glide Memorial United Methodist Church asked me to help them with their low-income housing facility, to help redo some aspects of the sanctuary. I was going to Glide at that time.

Q: Tell me more about Glide. How did you get there?

Holgate: I was friends with the people at MAC, the clothing store. A friend from there named Ben and I led a Shanti support group, and we became good friends, and I think he told me about it. He said, “You really should check Glide out, they have great gospel.” So, I started going every Sunday.

Q: Between Big Piney and San Francisco, had you gone to any other church in the interim?

Holgate: Not really. When I came out, I was really turned off by church, because of their not accepting me. I started doing a lot of reading about metaphysical things, about Buddhist teachings. I realized that was more the direction my spiritual path could take.

When I got introduced to Glide, the thing I liked about it was that it was so mixed, and there were a lot of gay people there, and Reverend Cecil Williams was standing up talking about how it’s okay to be gay, even though the Methodist church was telling him it wasn’t, he didn’t listen. He still preached the opposite. The choir was great, and it just felt like a community.

Q: So this project helping out with the housing and the church allowed you to say, “Okay, now I’m going to do my own thing.”

Holgate: That was the moment when I was overwhelmed, when I was like, “I can’t do both.” And that’s when I decided to do my own thing.

Q: So did clients just start coming?

Holgate: A lady called and said, “You know, I’ve got a house in Atherton, would you come down and look?” So we were about six months into it – and this is just when I was pretty new – and I get a call. I was in the hospital because I had had my appendix out. She said, “Robert, can you fly to Vail with us next week, we want you to look at this house we just bought.” So I said, “Sure, I’ll go.” They had their own jet, so we flew down to Vail and we walked through this house and it was on Beaver Dam Road, and the ski lift was just right there. So you could ski in and ski out of the house. That was my first big break.




Private Residence, Vail, Colorado Photos: JD Peterson

Q: Where did the phrase Wu Wei come from?

Holgate: My client and friend Wendy came up with term, and then I looked it up. It’s about things finding their right place. Wendy had a penthouse at Fourth and Brannan, and we would move stuff around until it was just right. She was one of my first clients. Wendy’s different in the sense that she doesn’t like what’s normal or safe. She likes things that are different. I am pretty intuitive – I can usually tell, after just a little bit of time, what it is clients like or don’t like. With Wendy, we were just in synch from the beginning. We both got in the same space, and then we’d look at something or do an installation or do an arrangement in harmony. It is a kind of a spiritual thing, because we’d move it around and say, “Oh no, no, this, this, this, oh, that’s it!” And we’d do it for hours.

We were in New York, and it was around Christmas time, and I loved going to see Bergdorf’s windows at Christmas, and they had these wonderful book sculptures in the window. That’s where I got the idea, so we did that.


Residential Loft, San Francisco, California Photo: JD Peterson


Inverness House Photo: David Wakely

Q: Do very many clients talk about that aspect of the work?

Holgate: I get goose bumps when I’m working with somebody if something feels right, or if I really love something. So I say, “Oh God, I got goose bumps.” Now quite a few of my clients say, “Well, did you get goose bumps?” Because they won’t get something unless I got goose bumps. But I think it’s a pretty good indicator for me, and I think it’s really kind of my soul coming through, kind of a higher power coming through when I get those.

Q: Talk more about that, if you can.

Holgate: In this apartment, I don’t have anything here I don’t love, absolutely love. It’s my requirement. And I try to get my clients to feel the same way about what they have. I feel like it’s a connection to source energy. If you can keep things around you that you love, then you create harmony, and then people who come into your space feel that.







Holgate Residence, San Francisco, CA Photos: JD Peterson

Q: Let’s talk about our friend Al’s apartment in the Brocklebank. I met you when you were working with him. The first time I saw that color, I was sort of shocked, but then I came to understand how it came out of the Chris Brown painting and Al’s art collection. He was moving from a four-story house and bringing 40 years of stuff into a smaller apartment.

Holgate: I started by talking with him about everything he had, looking through it, getting an idea of what was important and what wasn’t important. With him it was all about honoring the art, that’s where the color came from. He also has strong opinions. But it’s fun with him, because his stuff is part of his memories and brings him real joy.












Brocklebank Apartment, San Francisco, CA Photos: David Wakely

Q: So let’s go back to spiritual practices. What happened after Glide?

Holgate: I just got really busy.

Q: And as far as your own spiritual practice?

Holgate: Because of my childhood, I just shut down. I needed a way to find a path to opening my heart and not being afraid all the time. And so, doing the design and helping people with their houses and creating spaces they love and they’re happy with, I think was part of that path. It brought me joy, I become very present, I am totally in what I’m doing. I think spirituality is being present. Being compassionate, being open in your heart, being present, and being willing to show up.

Faith Inside Out? Random Thoughts on the 40th Anniversary of the Manson Murders

This isn’t a blog about design. The structures I’m mentioning weren’t architecturally significant, and most of them no longer exist. It’s a rumination about faith turned inside out.

Forty years ago today, Charles Manson’s “Family” brutally murdered actress Sharon Tate and four others in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon. The next day, they murdered the LaBiancas across town in Los Feliz. Joan Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album” that no one was surprised. I am not quite sure what she meant by that. Woodstock took place a few days later, but the lazy hazy romantic notion of hippiedom was over. I am still trying to sort out those two days in the summer of 1969 and why they continue to interest me. On April 8, 1966, TIME posited that God was dead. Some bizarre faith healers, including Charles Manson, showed up to fill the void.

Within a few weeks of the murders, LIFE magazine ran several photos of the crime scene, and a few of us ten- and eleven-year-old kids at the community recreation center began playing amateur sleuths, theorizing how this could have happened and who was guilty. We were mesmerized. There were celebrities, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Like most vast conspiracies, this one wasn’t. If one of the Manson girls, who was in jail on an unrelated charge, hadn’t started bragging, the crime might not have been solved. I never got the event out of my head. It was a milestone, an announcement that childhood was over, and as Didion pointed out, it was the end of the 1960s. Maybe that’s what nobody was surprised about.

Most days, I walk three blocks south from the Civic Center BART station to my office on Folsom Street. I pass any number of people who look like they could have been in a snapshot of the Manson family. Recently I even saw one who was a dead ringer for (a taller) Charlie Manson. I was afraid to look him in the eye. I wonder how many of these homeless people are actually violent. I am distancing them. Charles Manson offers a permanent context for the “other.”

Manson was the most extreme of cult leaders. Ten years after his crime spree, people talked about a raft of softer gurus, like Rajneesh, Muktananda, and even Maharishi, as having formed cults that recruited middle-class children. And then there was Werner Erhard, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard, and others. Several high school friends of mine took Erhard’s est. Another friend ran off with the Moonies, and another took Scientology and eventually converted from Judaism to Catholicism. A close friend followed Muktananda, changed her name, and disappeared. I don’t mean to suggest that any of those gurus were cult leaders, nor that they resembled Manson. The late 1960s erased a postwar tape that included fairly prescribed religious paths for the middle class. And in the 1960s and 1970s, we were easy targets for shamans of all stripes. You think you wouldn’t fall under the spell of a false prophet, but where along the continuum does an authentic helper or faith leader become a destructive madman?

When you see or hear former members of Manson’s family on TV occasionally, they look and sound relatively normal. And it makes me think, how did kids just a few years older than me lose their way like that? Is redemption even possible? How close were any of us aimless kids to falling off the rails? How much angrier (or how high) would we have to have been to follow a madman who talked about starting an armed black Armageddon being waged from an underground city in Death Valley? If you think the Weatherman were out there, read the Wikipedia definition of “Helter Skelter (Mansion Version).” Manson quoted extensively from Beatles songs and the Book of Revelations. His was a strange brew of religion and popular culture. This was a pattern that we watched replay itself in other places like Jonestown, and later, Waco.

Growing up in Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s, we romanticized the folks we saw floating around on Telegraph Avenue. It was a long way from resisting conformity to the violence of August 1969. But that was one of the revelations of a middle-class white-male-dominated media. The ragged, fringed, long haired kids all blurred into one “other.” Exaggeration sold papers – at least back then.

In 1990, I drove up Benedict Canyon and found the house on Cielo Drive, still standing, behind a solid fence. From the gate, you could only see the top of the garage. There was little else to look at, even from the road across the canyon. My first apartment in Los Angeles was only a few blocks from the still-standing LaBianca House on Waverly Drive. Yes, I felt guilty being a murder tourist. Why had I read prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter twice? He pieced together the extraordinary concept of Helter Skelter and took the enormous risk of foregrounding the wacky idea as the motive for murder. He explained a mad revolution that was based on Manson’s twisted theology.


Tate Polanski residence

Of course, Roman Polanski went on to have legal troubles after a liaison with a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive. He no longer visits the United States. Sometime in the 1970s, I saw Polanski’s masterpiece, Chinatown (where in one famous scene Polanski appears as a gangster and slices Nicholson’s nose). Polanski gave us the narrative for the creation of sprawling Los Angeles. It was born of a different kind of lust.

Within a matter of minutes, you now can find photos of the houses and the victims. You can learn that members of a band called Nine Inch Nails were the last occupants of the Tate/Polanski residence on Cielo Drive, and that the house was replaced by a Mediterranean-on-steroids monstrosity in 1994. The photos during Polanski’s tenancy show an American flag draped over an ample tuxedo couch, a few antiques, and some contemporary art on the walls. Good taste with a groovy flourish. When the relatively modest ranch house that was tucked into the landscape was razed, bits of stone and walls were sold to those interested in the macabre. Trent Renzor, of Nine Inch Nails, relocated the famous front door to Nothing Studios in New Orleans. The things you find out when you have a laptop and a few minutes to spare at the airport.


Spahn Movie Ranch


Spahn Movie Ranch


Spahn Movie Ranch

Just this week, a parole board approved parole for Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme. Sharon Tate’s late mother organized a successful campaign against parole for Manson and his followers. A few people escaped the actual event, including the landlord’s caretaker/houseboy and Linda Kasabian, who left the Family and became the prosecution’s star witness. It seems unlikely that the people who participated in the murders, despite their rehabilitation, will ever be paroled. Redemption will only take place inside prison.

Those events ruined the lives of dozens and dozens of people. Murder, cruelty, even bullying, ripples outward in ways nobody knows. In 1969, a number of people hungry for some kind of faith or misplaced recognition hooked up with a weird little man who portrayed himself as a new savior. He killed the essence of young people’s humanity, and they followed him into the night.