San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California vibe deep in the heart of Texas
Home goods line has Bay Area roots
Atherton native Constance Holt-Garza met her husband, Jamey Garza, in San Francisco in 1993 — she was a textile designer with a shop on Brady Street; he was an in-demand design-build craftsman who had studied at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Despite the long heritage of the Bay Area as a home for bohemians and creatives, the couple decamped to Marfa, Texas — by way of a five-year layover in Los Angeles — in 2003, at the behest of hotelier Liz Lambert, who needed help with the renovation of the town’s historic Thunderbird Motel. (On a local note, Lambert’s Bunkhouse Group added the Tenderloin’s Phoenix Hotel to its portfolio of funky boutique stays last year.) The couple embarked on a well-trodden path blazed by the late artist Donald Judd, who moved to Marfa in 1979, finding inspiration in the stark landscape of the TransPecos desert for his minimalist works — sculpture and furniture that may appear, to the untrained eye, plain and bulky. But to the more discerning, especially those who have actually made the trek to this West Texas map blip (pop. 1,772), Judd’s eye for simplicity, chunky forms and integrity of materials can be seen as reflections of the remote terrain — after all, the art and the location are nothing if not unapologetic, autonomous.
Since artists are notorious for craving space and independence to pursue their talent and vision, Marfa has become, in the last decade, a hub for the free-spirited and creatively inclined. While absconding to the Bay Area in 1987 was fateful for Garza, a native of Austin, Texas (he met his wife here and had the opportunity, through his work as one-half of a two-man facilities crew at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County and as a craftsman for local event maestro Stanlee Gatti, to confab with the likes of artists David Ireland and Ellsworth Kelly), the formative time also set him up to better appreciate his home state, once it was time to return.
“Coming back to Texas with Constance … I don’t know, things just looked different than they did when I was growing up,” says Garza, 55, who worked primarily on hospitality-and residential improvement projects around Marfa, including the couple’s own 1910 adobe and the one owned by Sam Hamilton, owner of the Pac Heights kitchen-concept shop March. “And I really started to become aware of the vivid quality of the light.”
The couple’s Garza Marfa line, established in 2010, includes handloomed serapeesque linen textiles that are officially inspired by Bolivian frazada blankets, although Marfa’s close proximity to the Mexican border seems to be a more effortless association. The collection’s handcrafted furniture — early originals included saddle-leather cots and round chairs with bentrod frames — immediately call to mind the Texas frontier, from light to landscape.
The striated pattern of Holt-Garza’s blankets, shawls and scarves feature the singular colors of the high desert at different times of the day — a mint-orange-pink combination might represent a winter morning in Marfa, while a bolder red-orange-teal colorway seems to evoke a peakof-summer sunset. More recently, Holt-Garza, 53, whose love of native textiles kicked in while exploring the sari shops on University Avenue in Berkeley back in the mid-1990s, introduced upholstery for cushioned Garza Marfa benches with long bolster pillows.
Also new to the collection
are cast-aluminum bucket chairs with orange or teal powder-coated steel bases. On one hand, they are an homage to Judd, who created many works in aluminum; most significantly, an installation of large, milled-aluminum boxes at the Chinati Foundation, a museum founded by the artist in 1986 on an old Marfa military site.
“Being in Marfa, you can’t help but be influenced by Judd’s really simple approach to design and materials, and the way his pieces take up space,” says Garza. ( Judd quite famously shunned painting for sculpture, saying, “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a surface.”)
On the other hand, the bucket chairs, which take cues from a classic Eames shell, also speak to Garza’s love of hot rods and dragsters. “We designed a bucket seat with midcentury familiarity and the finish of a really cool car,” he says.
In California, Garza Marfa is sold at Heath Ceramics, which also has the exclusive on the furniture (the textiles, however, are also carried locally at Captain Oko in Point Reyes Station and Esqueleto in Oakland). Catherine Bailey, co-owner and creative director at Heath, which just celebrated its 70th anniversary, considers the Garzas kindred spirits in design.
“Jamey and Constance’s work really helped define Heath’s style of the home,” says Bailey. “Heath has deep roots in California’s midcentury aesthetic — clean simplicity combined with honesty of material. Garza Marfa is all of those things, but with a blend of fresh materials and colors that feels original.” Proof that you can take the designers out of California, but you can’t take California out of the designers.