Sea Ranch sweatshirt reminds me of better days
I have a great friend whom I met working on a magazine. I had been brought in as editor-in-chief and she had been hired as its copy editor, so we were going to be spending a lot of time in each other’s company, even though we had never worked together before.
Quickly it became apparent that it was all going to be just fine when, one day, in reference to a graphic design idea for a page layout, one of us said, “I just love the ’70s” and then the other said, “me too!”
And that was how it went, for several years, with both of us blondes basically in full, enthusiastic agreement on most everything from tacos to suntans (good) to fake, overly made-up people (bad). And now, even though we no longer work together on a magazine, we’re still the greatest of friends.
I was reminded of this on a recent trip to San Francisco when I found myself in a time warp two hours up the California coast at a place I have always wanted to visit called Sea Ranch.
A planned community along a spectacular 16-kilometre stretch of the rugged California coastline that was founded back in ’65 by a Hawaiian-based developer called Oceanic Properties and given its unique, eco-esthetic vibe by a Bay Area landscape architect named Lawrence Halprin, Sea Ranch is a utopia for nature-loving contemporary architecture junkies.
Rather than simply selling off the property in equally sized lots, the idealistic Halprin planned Sea Ranch as a community of homes clustered around shared open spaces to maximize their sea views. Inspired by the traditional ways of the lands’ first inhabitants, the Pomo Indians, along with the historic barns of Sonoma county, these homes were to be built out of Indigenous materials and designed to recede into the landscape, as if they had just been swept ashore, like driftwood sculptures.
What’s more, any bourgeois ugliness, say in the form of pots of geraniums or front lawns, were basically banned. The result was that everyone who bought into the property also had to buy into a shared esthetic of raw unpainted wood, dramatically sloping rooflines, graphically placed skylights and Acorn stoves. Fifty years later, the beds still have Marimekko print sheets, the wood floors are topped with kilims and flokatis, and there are still no streetlights, no wires and no cars on view.
We stayed in one of the rooms in the Sea Ranch lodge, with an outdoor hot tub that faced onto the cliff through a sort of sliding barn door, as if we were horses in a stall. After long, quiet days of doing nothing besides hiking the beaches and ogling the houses, we sipped a Napa red and soaked under the stars. Most of the other guests were significantly older than us — Sea Ranch pioneers now well into their senior years. But it turns out these hippie utopians are my kind of people. So much so that I just had to buy the sweatshirt, which, just like the place, seems like a relic from another, arguably better, time. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Her new book, What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss is published by the House of Anansi Press. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.