Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles: Scouting the new market

Low-slung Warehouse No. 10, freshly painted in a bright navy yellow, opened its doors Friday as Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles, a crafts fair-meets-foodie market in San Pedro. More than 3,000 people marked opening day by sampling gourmet donuts, alcohol-infused cupcakes and handmade wares at more than 60 booths set under an open-truss ceiling with whirling fans. (That's Janeen Gudelj, owner of Donut Snob, pictured here, holding one of her handmade creations.)

Crafted is the brainchild of Wayne Blank, known for his transformation of an old Southern Pacific rail yard into the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica.  For the last 18 months, Blank and his partners, real estate developer Howard Robinson and designer Alison Zeno, were busy turning the 1944 naval warehouse into what they hope will be the country's largest indoor craft market operating year-round, with as many as 550 vendors.

With Alicia Murphy's indie folk music playing when the doors opened at 11 a.m. Friday, crafts aficionados headed down the aisles and watched artists in action -- painting doghouses, cutting paper rosettes, carving leather, crocheting bracelets and tying nautical-knot key chains.

The 10-by-10-foot stalls were filled with jaunty felt hats and recycled leather bags, bookends made of old LPs and candles shaped like macaroni and cheese. For the foodies, there were artisanal moles and marmalades, gourmet pickles and truffle salts. We scanned the booths for this sampling of the crafts and craftspeople at the new market:

At Coyote House, every day is an Earth Day

Oh, how far we've come from Earth Days past — when the phrase “green home” conjured images of straw-bale structures, when solar panels seemed like such an earnest novelty, when “LEED certified” hadn't yet crept into public consciousness.

With Earth Day 2012 almost upon us, nearly 60,000 homes in the United States are in the process of being certified in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Education and Environmental Design program, according to Nate Kredich, the organization's vice president of residential market development. Need more convincing proof of just how far we've come? Take a peek at the new home of architect Ken Radtkey and landscape architect Susan Van Atta.

PHOTO GALLERY: 26-picture tour of Coyote House

INFOGRAPHIC: How the garden roofs, cisterns and other green elements work

The husband and wife's three-bedroom house nestled into a Montecito hillside is dubbed the Coyote House, partly after the name of the couple's street, partly after the howling critters in the area. Beyond its abundance of energy- and water-saving features, however, the house is notable for its utter normality: On the most basic level, it is simply a comfortable and beautiful family home.

“Designing sustainably was a given for us,” says Radtkey, founder of Blackbird Architects, a Santa Barbara firm with an emphasis on sustainable design. “But the most important goal was to make a great home.”

To that end, the house starts with a modern take on the veranda, right. A covered room overlooking the front garden has a sliding screen and front and back sets of glass pocket doors that can open to the outdoors or seal it off in various ways, depending on the season and weather.

A dozen highly flammable eucalyptus trees — by coincidence, cut down just months before the November 2008 Tea fire that swept through the region — were used to build the front door, kitchen table, bookcases, stairs and banister. Other materials used for interior appointments were sustainable too: Cabinets are bamboo, the floors are cork or salvaged stone, most of the walls unpainted plaster.

Bergamot Station developer plans craft marketplace in San Pedro

As dreams go, it’s a big one: 550 artisans filling 135,000 square feet of warehouse space with handmade glass, locally crafted furniture, felt hats, carved leather accessories, artisanal foods and more — a mega mash-up of foodie market and hipster craft fair, all in one place. That is the vision for Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles, which aims to parlay the popularity of modern “maker” events, such as the semiannual Unique L.A. and Renegade craft fairs, into a permanent marketplace filling two 1940s warehouses in San Pedro.

Lest cynics think the concept seems overly ambitious, the project’s driving force can point to a track record: Crafted is the brainchild of Wayne Blank, known for his transformation of an old Southern Pacific rail yard into the successful Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica.

Blank’s partners are real estate developer Howard Robinson and designer Alison Zeno, who intend to fill their warehouses with 10-by-10-foot stalls complemented by specialty food carts in the adjoining courtyard every weekend.

Architects recycle truck trailer into lofty tower

Mexican architects Alejandro D'Acosta and Claudia Turrent have turned a priest's 19th century adobe house into a 21st century residence, rejiggered a hotel of ill repute into their architecture office and built a rammed-earth dwelling into a seaside cliff in Ensenada. But it's their off-grid country home in the Valle de Guadalupe wine region that may be their most unusual project to date: The house is partially built from an abandoned refrigerator truck trailer, but unlike the converted shipping container projects that have been so fashionable in architecture, this one is flipped up on its end — a tower with rooms stacked vertically.

PHOTO GALLERY: Truck trailer remade as loft tower

Dubbed El Granito for the elephantine granite boulders that surround the property, the 50-acre parcel was the discovery of D'Acosta's brother, winemaker Hugo D'Acosta, and a friend while they were looking for land to plant more vines. In a rocky plain where hawks soar on thermals by day and coyotes call to the moon by night, they came upon the truck trailer lying on its side next to a cinder block shack. Barrels smelling of chemicals filled the trailer.

“It was an abandoned meth lab — more el gramito than El Granito,” said a chuckling D'Acosta, referring to the term for a gram of drugs. “We liked the idea of taking a place that was used for making something bad and turning it into a creative place to cook up some good ideas.”

Home tour: Rammed-earth house on an Ensenada cliff

There's nothing new about rammed-earth construction, tapial in Spanish. The technique for building walls using earth, chalk, lime and gravel is ancient, found in 2,000-year-old watchtowers in Dunhuang, China, or the 13th century Pakimé pyramids in Mexico, or contemporary Hmong houses in Vietnam.

But architects Alejandro D'Acosta and Claudia Turrent, known for their experiments in sustainable living, recently completed their own version of an earthen home in a most unlikely place: built into a seaside cliff in Ensenada, Mexico.

PHOTO GALLERY: Rammed-earth house on the Ensenada coast

They call it the Bridge House, not surprising because the other main components are recycled 100-year-old redwood planks from a bridge in Northern California. The couple bought 200 of the timbers, each 27 feet long and 1 ton, from a salvage yard in Rosarito Beach. The planks have been used to fashion the front walkway and back deck, the front door, the roof, the house floor and the kitchen table. Other broken and splintered posts of varying heights are stationed on the deck, “recalling an old pier,” said D'Acosta, who admires the shadows they cast on the land.

Designer Isabel Griswold's colorful, computer-free home zone

Rooms, like people, have different chapters in their lives — some exciting and some, well, not so much. Such was the case of a small, unassuming room attached to the garage of a 1938 Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills. When interior designer Isabel Mata Griswold and her husband, developer Eduardo Thackeray, bought the property in 1999, the 14-by-20-foot room was empty. Griswold kept the existing beige shag carpet, added floor-to-ceiling mirrors along the back wall, and for the next four years she used it as a gym.

When son Alex returned home from college, she replaced the shag with wall-to-wall sisal and put in a queen bed. Voila! A studio apartment. When Alex moved out, Griswold said the room became “a catch-all warehouse for files, fabric samples and anything else we didn't want in the main house.”

At long last, she recently wrote a more exciting chapter in the life of the room. She transformed the plain-vanilla space into a Moroccan-flavored retreat for herself. “I wanted a place to come and dream, talk to close friends, watch a good movie,” Griswold said. “There are no phones or computers. This is purely a fun room. It has no other purpose.”

Griswold’s associate, Paul Olson, cut arches out of 0.75-inch medium density fiberboard, which was glued to the old mirrored wall, above. Artist Kaveri Singh then stenciled a stylized pomegranate. “The arches over the mirror reflect the garden and the fountain outside and make the room appear much larger than it is,” Griswold said.

She designed the sleek, L-shaped sectional sofa finished in brown linen with bronze nailheads on the upholstered legs. "The sofas are the same size as two twin beds, so when you remove the bolsters, two people can sleep here," she said. 

Here's a quick look at how the designer created a space that feels plucked from the pages of “The Arabian Nights” — fitting given that she is the great-grand-niece of explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, known for his mid-19th century translation of the folk tales. Keep reading for more details ...

Silent film studio revived as architect's live-work retreat

A hundred years before “The Artist” made its run for Oscar history, American Film Co. arrived in Santa Barbara and produced nearly 1,000 silent films in what the industry considered Hollywood North. You can find out about the influential Flying A, as the studio was called, and take a trip back in time at the recently opened Santa Barbara Historical Museum exhibition “The Flying A: Silent Film in Santa Barbara.” Or if you're architect Peter Becker, you can simply take a walk in your garden.

Becker is the proud owner of what had been part of the Flying A. His long, narrow garden, planted circa 1913, still has the original redwood pergola and a profusion of Cecile Brunners, the ubiquitous soft pink roses that bear successive flushes in spring, summer and fall.

“Indeed, they seem to be in bloom year round,” says Becker, who believes his Cecile Brunners may be some of the earliest plantings of the rose in Southern California.

PHOTO GALLERY: Peter Becker's garden and home

They are but one part of the silent film studio once located at Chapala and Mission streets — at its peak, “one of the most influential studios in the world, cranking out nearly a reel or two a day,” says Dana Driskel, studio professor of film media studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Small Schindler house in Inglewood remodeled for a new era

Architect Steven Ehrlich is sitting in the front garden of a 1940 Rudolph M. Schindler home in Inglewood that he recently restored for daughter Onna Ehrlich-Bell and her family. Forty-foot-tall liquidambars line the street of mostly post-World War II houses. It's a real Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood, traditional to its core except for this low-slung piece of modern design. For two years, this is where Ehrlich spent much of his time — “channeling Schindler,” he says with a chuckle.

As Ehrlich tells the story, it was serendipity that he came upon the home by the renowned midcentury architect whose iconic Kings Road House in West Hollywood is often considered the big bang of California Midcentury Modernism. Ehrlich and his wife, Nancy Griffin, had been invited to dinner by friends Kali Nikitas and Richard Shelton.

"I'd never been to their home before," Ehrlich says, "but as soon as I walked through the door, I asked, 'Is this a Schindler?' "

PHOTO GALLERY: Side-by-side Schindler houses in Inglewood

It was. And so was the house next door, and, incredibly, another down the street. As fate would have it, the Schindler next door was the subject of a probate sale the next day. “He built three houses on the same street in 1940 for a developer on spec, which was very unusual for him,” says Kimberli Meyer, director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Kings Road House, where Schindler explored the relationship of space, light and form, as well as communal living.

Ehrlich toured the Inglewood probate house the following day, then put in the winning bid: $265,000.

A little genius: Reviving an L.A. master's modestly sized house

It was October 2007, the height of the real estate frenzy, and Kali Nikitas and Richard Shelton had all but given up on owning their own home. “We were spending all our time looking at houses, then bidding on them and never getting one,” says Shelton, who, along with his wife, is an academic administrator at Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester. “It was driving us crazy.”

Around midnight of the day they called it quits, Nikitas went on Craigslist for one last try. She typed in “Westside” and a price range of $450,000 to $650,000. The first house to appear was a modern home. She clicked on it. That's when the screaming began. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! It's a Schindler!”

PHOTOS: Side-by-side Schindlers in Inglewood

She called at 8 the next morning, and at 2 p.m. she and Shelton met with owner Grace Berryman. "You're suppose to play it cool. We did not play it cool," Nikitas says, laughing. "I told her, 'We're going to give you everything we have. We want this house.' "

Asked by Berryman what they planned to do with the house, the couple answered in unison: Restore it. “That must have been the right answer,” Shelton says.

Two hours later they shook hands on the deal. They were the new owners of an authentic two-bedroom, one-bath, nearly 1,000-square-foot house by one of the most renowned architects of the 20th century, Rudolph M. Schindler. Price: $580,000.

“Never in our wildest dreams,” Nikitas says, “did either one of us ever think we would be living in a home by such an important architect.”

Inglewood Open Studios: Artists drawn to evolving community

When the annual Inglewood Open Studios kicks off Nov. 12 with drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and more, fans of art and design will find much to appreciate beyond the city's side-by-side Schindler houses.

Can the city finally get beyond Dr. Dre rapping in "California Love" 16 years ago that Inglewood is "always up to no good"? It's about time people drop the negative image, said MonaLisa Whitaker, executive director of Inglewood Cultural Arts, a nonprofit organization that fosters interdisciplinary arts programs.

"Inglewood has challenges like any city," she said. "It just seems there's always a tendency to highlight the negative rather than positive things that happen here."

One of those positives: the number of artists moving into the community in search of large, loft-like spaces and cheaper rent. Otis College of Art and Design graduate Renee Fox moved here about five years ago from Hollywood with her husband, sculptor and painter Kenneth Ober. Shortly thereafter, Fox and a few local artists organized the first open studios tour for family and friends.

"There were six artists that first year," Fox said. "This year we have more than 30."