Tracey Taylor

Financial Times, March 20 2010

It is either a vision for a new residential utopia in one of the most beautiful spots in the world or the most ill-conceived plan for a new city for a long time. Opinion is divided on a proposal to transform Treasure Island, a 400-acre man-made outcrop with picture-postcard views of San Francisco, into an environmentally sustainable neighbourhood for up to 24,000 residents.

Its supporters appear to be in the ascendant and the result could, they say, create some of the world’s hottest properties; but whether their dream is fulfilled or not the project has some important lessons as cities throughout the world look to islands, both natural and man-made, to try to solve their expansion, transport and housing problems.

Originally built in 1936 to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, Treasure Island is just a couple of miles offshore from San Francisco and considered within its city limits. It is connected by a small isthmus to Yerba Buena Island, the landing point of the Bay Bridge, the only overland link between San Francisco and the East Bay and its urban hubs of Oakland and Berkeley.

Treasure Island’s flat, windswept terrain is home to about 1,400 residents and many abandoned military buildings, oil facilities and electrical transformers. There is little here to connect the site to the book that inspired its name – the site is named after the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in San Francisco from 1879 to 1880 – or to suggest the glorious future that is being heralded for it.

Owned by the US Navy, the island was decommissioned in 1996. Last December San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, negotiated to buy it in a deal that will see the navy receiving a guaranteed $55m over 10 years from the city, plus an additional $50m if the private investors involved in the project get an 18 per cent return. Newsom is confident the project can be a showcase development, citing the thousands of jobs that will be created and the fact that the money to pay the navy will come from developers, not city coffers. This is a potential sore point for a city that is facing a $522m budget deficit next year.

The proposals are ambitious, particularly in terms of sustainable building – concerns likely to be associated with any island development project and expensive, at an estimated cost of $1.4bn. A master plan developed for the island by architectural and engineering services company Skidmore, Owings and Merrill details up to 8,000 new homes, 30 per cent of which would be affordable to those on lower incomes, several solar-powered skyscrapers, an organic farm, three hotels, several shops and restaurants, a waste-water treatment plant and 300 acres of recreational land. The project’s private development team is a partnership of local company Wilson Meany Sullivan, national homebuilder Lennar Urban and private equity real estate development firm Kenwood Investments.

All of the island’s new streets would be set at a 68° north-south angle in order to minimise wind exposure and two old naval aircraft hangars would be recycled into retail and entertainment centres. Terminal 1, an imposing building featured in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, would be transformed into a ferry terminal.

On the environmental front, roof-top turbines would provide buildings with power and solar heating systems in the residential areas would supply up to 80 per cent of the new neighbourhood’s hot-water needs. San Francisco has already aggressively reduced the amount of rubbish it sends to landfills but it has upped the ante for Treasure Island, aiming to zero-out solid waste by 2020.

With chronic drought affecting cities across California, water conservation is key. A quarter of the island’s treated water would be recycled for irrigating its farm, as well as for flushing toilets in commercial buildings and washing boats in the marina. The island would still get its potable water from the mainland but, through recycling and conservation measures, it is estimated it would use only 218m gallons per year.

Finally, large-scale wind turbines would be installed in the uninhabited area for energy generation.

The design, which comes in the wake of many years of planning, has already earned a number of awards, including an American Institute of Architects National Honor Award and recognition by the Clinton Climate Initiative, former US president Bill Clinton’s greenhouse gas campaign.

However, sceptics question whether it is sensible to develop an island built out of seismically unsafe sand and gravel in an area of the world known for its earthquakes. In addition, conservation experts predict climate change will raise sea levels more than 4½ft by 2100, casting doubts over the wisdom of developing the island and similar sites worldwide.

“These 400 acres are an example of what can happen to 280 sq miles in the greater San Francisco area,” says Will Travis, executive director at the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which has jurisdiction over part of the Treasure Island project. He cites places such as downtown San Francisco, its international airport and the newly developed Mission Bay neighbourhood, which are all built on land susceptible to flooding in future. “The obvious strategy is a planned retreat and certainly not to build anything new,” he says. “But instead we are opting for innovation and to adapt to the sea level rise.” He says the levees that are part and parcel of the development designs will be increased in height over time at no cost to the taxpayer.

His attitude to the seismic issue is similarly bullish. “The Bay Area is a bad place to build anything. But we have learned how to build for earthquakes.” He says the advantage of Treasure Island is that it offers the opportunity to start from scratch with the most up-to-date expertise.

There are also transportation issues. Bart, the region’s subway network, does not stop there and the Bay Bridge provides the only road access. Its east span is currently being replaced and is already over capacity and adding thousands of cars could take it to the brink. Travis points out that the goal is to create a compact, mixed-use residential community which is not car-dependent. “There will be a new ferry terminal and buses to San Francisco and the East Bay. A whole fleet of new ferries is currently under construction,” he adds, and mentions Vancouver, site of the recent winter Olympics, as a model for a transit-focused city.

Ruth Gravanis, an environmental advocate in San Francisco, has been monitoring the designs for Treasure Island since 1996. She is supportive of the proposals and feels they have been improved incrementally over time. “As other cities have introduced green initiatives, it has forced this plan to stay in the vanguard,” she says. She likes the fact that housing units are not automatically being sold or rented with parking spaces included and that amenities for cyclists and pedestrians have been incorporated into the proposals. But she believes that for a project attempting to minimise its carbon footprint, there is still too much space devoted to parking. “But I’m cautiously optimistic. They’ve made lots of good changes,” she says. “At first the ferry was going to go the east side of the island. Now it’s the west. It took them a while but they saw sense in the end.”

If San Francisco can keep the project on track and crunch the numbers to make it work, it seems as if support for the development will help push it through. And with cities consuming 75 per cent of our natural resources, a blank-canvas development such this one might just become a blueprint for new communities the world over.

Insular appeal: The enduring allure of the artificial

San Francisco’s Treasure Island is not the only island that was originally built for an international exhibition. Ile Notre-Dame was built in 10 months – from 15m tons of rocks excavated to create the Montreal metro – for Expo 67, a celebration of Canada’s centennial. Expo 67 is considered to have been the most successful world fair of the 20th century, with more than 50m visitors and 62 nations participating. Today the island hosts the Canadian Formula One Grand Prix and much of the open land is enjoyed by rowers, cyclists and, in the winter, ice skaters.

Perhaps the world’s best known artificial islands are in Dubai, where an ambitious initiative has created the Palm Islands and the World Islands, among others, both of which make a dramatic impression when viewed from the sky. The economic downturn has put a halt to the government’s plans to build more islands and so far only the Palm Jumeirah is inhabited. Celebrities such as actor Brad Pitt and soccer players David Beckham and Michael Owen are among those believed to have bought homes there.

Several of the world’s airports have been sited on artificial islands and when London mayor Boris Johnson announced in 2008 that the city’s Heathrow Airport was a “planning error” and that a new airport should be built on an island on the Thames estuary, he might have had Kansai International Airport in his mind’s eye. Located on an artificial island in the middle of Osaka Bay in Japan, Kansai was designed by architect Renzo Piano and opened in 1994. Twenty years in the planning, it became the most expensive civil works project in modern history – costing in excess of $20bn – not least because it was discovered that the island had sunk eight metres as a result of the weight of the material used in construction.

Other airports on islands include Chubu Centrair International Airport, New Kitakyushu Airport and Kobe Airport, all in Japan. Hong Kong International Airport, designed by Foster & Partners, was created using land reclamation from the existing islands of Chek Lap Kok and Lam Chau.

Financial Times, February 5 2010

Lunch options for the designers and architects who work near South Park, a pocket of green space in the heart of San Francisco, recently became much more interesting, writes Tracey Taylor. For the past few months, half a dozen street-food vendors have appeared on the square once a week, opening up shop for a couple of hours. You can get spicy chicken and rice from Adobo Hobo; a smoky Andouille sausage stew from Gumbo Man; a dessert of raspberry red babycakes from Wholesome Bakery; or quindim, a traditional sticky coconut custard, made by Brazilian Bites. Urban Nectar will probably have whipped up some freshly squeezed watermelon and strawberry juice to wash it all down.

The Crème Brûlée Man(@cremebruleecart) often turns up, too, with his pushcart and his kitchen blowtorch to produce a brittle, scorched crust on his lavender or Grand Marnier flavoured creams. Like several of the city’s street-food vendors, Crème Brûlée Man has become something of a local celebrity and media darling but he won’t reveal his name, for, like many of the chefs plying their trade from trucks and carts, he is unlicensed. But his 9,736 Twitter followers know precisely where to find him on any given day.

In San Francisco, where a new culinary trend makes headlines every week, street food has proved to have legs. Other US cities embraced the concept earlier. New York has always had its hot dog and pretzel carts. In Los Angeles, the Kogi Korean BBQ truck (@kogibbq), launched by Mark Manguera, was a pioneer in late 2008 and is now, thanks to its 53,400-plus Twitter followers, nothing less than a phenomenon. Newsweek magazine named it “America’s first viral eatery”.

But now that the Bay Area has got its teeth into kerb-side treats, it is making sure food carts are here to stay. Three separate street-food festivals were launched in 2009. “Street Food” took place in San Francisco itself; “Eat Real” was held in Jack London Square, a foodie destination near the port of Oakland; and the wine country jumped on the bandwagon with the World Street Food conference in Napa Valley.

The festivals lent a sheen of legitimacy to street food but a good percentage of the cart vendors are unlicensed, which means there is an element of subterfuge to how they operate. Many of them use social media, posting information about their new sandwich fillings and current locations on Twitter and Facebook. It is a strategy that seems to have appealed to tech-savvy Bay Area residents, many of whom relish a whiff of the underground.

Street food on the West Coast can trace its roots to the ubiquitous Mexican taco truck, and a good number of the new generation of vendors has renovated decommissioned taco trucks to launch their businesses.

Kate McEachern, though, opted for a mail truck when she went down the mobile route to sell cupcakes, and her turf is principally the streets of Berkeley. She posts the whereabouts of her Cupkates truck (@cupkatestruck) every morning to her 1,502 Twitter followers as well as her seasonal flavours, be it pumpkin spice in the autumn or fleur de sel caramel in the spring.

“I had dreams of opening a quaint cupcake store but it’s really difficult to raise start-up capital,” she says. “The truck lets me test the market. One aspect I love right now is the ability to interact closely with my customers every day.”

Some traditional restaurateurs have embraced the informality and “pop-up” nature of street carts as a refreshing alternative to running a restaurant. For budding chefs they offer a way to build a customer base with low overheads. And established chef-proprietors also see the appeal. Laurent Katgely, owner of Spencer’s Restaurant in San Francisco, opened takeaway truck Spencer On The Go(@chezspencergo) in May last year.

“It started as a fun idea but it has turned out to be a great advertising tool,” says Katgely, who points to the fact that the restaurant just had its best two months for business in seven years. He says the truck has also attracted a new crowd who were not previously drawn to French food because of the expense. “It’s great that we can offer $2 escargots or $10 foie gras this way.”

The economic downturn has been a key motivator for both street cart owners hoping to make a living and for customers looking to source fresh food relatively cheaply.

John Birdsall, online food editor at SF Weekly, says some street-food vendors favour gathering at private events but there’s always the threat of being shut down by the police. “There’s been a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitude from local authorities so far,” he says. But when particular food trucks begin to attract large crowds, it’s difficult to remain under the radar. Birdsall says there are signs that some vendors want to become legitimate. A workshop held in December that addressed the practical issues involved in securing a licence was well attended.

In San Francisco, some of the more recent arrivals on the scene include the Sexy Soup Lady and Sam’s Chowder Mobile. There’s also the Boozely’s Pickles and Preserves cart run by waiter Brad Koester; That Guy’s Fries, launched by two recent college graduates; and Crêperie Saint Germain, that serves chestnut, banana and vanilla ice-cream pancakes. Such variety suggests that diversity is still the name of the game in this city with its long history of politically correctness.

Financial Times, November 21, 2009

Photos: Tracey Taylor

Shortly after Jane Martin ripped up part of the concrete pavement in front of her home in San Francisco’s Mission District and planted a small garden, a police cruiser drove by and the officer leaned out of the window. “I give you two weeks before one of your windows is broken,” he said, pointing at the small river rocks Martin had used to cover the plant bed.

Her windows remained intact, however, and her garden thrived. In fact it attracted the attention of the local community and passers-by for positive reasons. People stopped to chat when she was out weeding and several neighbours asked her how they might go about planting their own front-of-house gardens.

Indeed this modest patch of succulents, evergreens and native flowers in one of the city’s densest neighbourhoods became the launch-pad for an ambitious greening project that has seen significant expanses of pavement replaced with gardens across San Francisco.

Martin, a landscape architect with her own practice, Shift Design Studio, had turned bare paving into an oasis of urban greenery before. A year or so earlier she effected a similar transformation on a 14ft-deep pavement in front of her former studio on Shotwell Street, a few blocks north of her current home. Fed up with the cavalier attitude taken by drivers who mounted the curb to overtake or even to park right outside her window, she decided to take action. “I was almost run over three times when stepping out of my door,” she says.

In San Francisco pavements are city property but it is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to maintain the area directly in front of their homes. Martin soon discovered, however, that making any significant changes to the paving involved negotiating a complex web of red tape. “I persevered but I wouldn’t recommend going through that process to anyone else. It was onerous,” she says.

Then a problem in her neighbourhood’s combined sewer system proved serendipitous. It led the city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, to see the advantages of introducing more permeable landscaping: the logic being that the more rain that goes into the ground, the less likely it is that sewers will become over-capacitated. With the support of the mayor’s office, Martin drafted a new, simple permit that allows residents to apply to landscape their pavements for a reasonable cost. The maximum one-off fee is $215 but this decreases to $160 when several households band together.

Lisa Zahner decided to do something about her rubbish-strewn pavement after picking up one discarded drinks can too many in front of her San Francisco home. Zahner lives on a busy street close to Alamo Square, a popular tourist destination due to its collection of Victorian “Painted Lady” houses. Her pavement was commandeered by pedestrians, dog walkers and cyclists and people stopping by at the bodega on the corner would routinely leave a trail of litter outside her front door.

Before she began the project Zahner asked her neighbours whether she could plant some of the space in front of their properties and offered to pay for the work herself. Several decided to get involved and the result was 65ft of landscaping and two extra tree wells on the street corner.

Zahner admits the plan stalled when the estimate for pulling up the 100-year-old paving came in. “It was more than $2,000,” she recalls. “I phoned my husband to see what he thought and he said: ‘What we put out in cash we will recoup in goodwill’. He was right. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Although she originally envisaged a sea of wildflowers, these didn’t take well and the bed outside Zahner’s home is now a profusion of hardy, native plants that need little watering. There are Douglas Irises, various grasses, daisies, yarrows and a huge Acacia tree. “I love looking out of the window and seeing plants and grasses rather than concrete,” says Zahner. “But it’s more than that. We’ve got to know many more people – neighbours, regular dog-walkers and others who just stop to talk about the flowers.”

As a near-neighbour of Martin’s in the Mission, Anne Wintroub found inspiration close at hand and she helped orchestrate a community planting project that brought together 20 local homeowners. Martin helped to mentor the group but insisted that the participants should do the lion’s share of the work. “We spent evenings together working on the permit, choosing plants and applying for a grant to help fund it all,” says Wintroub. “The co-ordinated approach paid off because we had real buy-in from everyone involved.”

Today half of Wintroub’s block boasts drought-tolerant pavement landscaping and she says the effects have been palpable. The garage door that used to be a graffiti canvas has remained untarnished for months and neighbours who met while working on the planting keep an eye out for one another. “This has made people much more respectful of the neighbourhood,” she says.

There have been more than 500 applications from San Franciscans to turn paving into micro-gardens in the three years since Martin helped usher in the new sidewalk landscaping permit. Martin has also launched PlantSF a volunteer body to help promote permeable landscaping in the city. The many residential projects have been mirrored on public spaces such as traffic islands and street meridians with the help of initiatives such as the city-backed Pavements to Parks organisation. Martin estimates that in the past five years more than 15,000 sq ft of concrete along pavement and street meridians have been converted into sustainable gardens.

This greening of the urban landscape has proved beneficial on many levels, as well as the obvious aesthetic one. It has brought a sense of community into areas where neighbours might not have known each other before; the permeable landscaping creates a habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife; it reduces global warming by absorbing heat rather than reflecting it; anecdotal evidence suggests it has helped reduce crime; and local estate agents say the gardens are helping to boost property values.

Martin’s own pavement garden on Harrison Street has expanded to include a bulb of paving that juts out on the corner of her street as a traffic calming measure. Previously a magnet for the illegal dumping of old furniture and garbage, it is now a beautiful small park where locals such as Carlos Lopez, who has lived in the Mission for more than 20 years, stop by to pull out some weeds or sit on one of the built-in benches to chat to neighbours.

The planting includes purple Hibiscus, sage, lavender, Torch lilies and Californian poppies, which attract bumble bees and hummingbirds. “It was design by potluck,” Martin says. “Over time people have brought cuttings or flowers from their own gardens.” In one planter someone has hung a couple of translucent baubles that catch the sun in the breeze. Half embedded in the soil nearby is a toy dinosaur.

For Martin, whose mother was a gardener and who grew up with a large garden in suburban Iowa, this is how it should be. “I see the earth as potential. And it seems strange to me to seal off all that potential under concrete,” she says.

Financial Times, October 3 2009

houseplans.com

Tim Young, a freelance editor in Mahopac, New York, drew a sketch of his dream home on the back of a cocktail napkin. It would, he decided, be modern, with a loft-like feel inside. Next, he put his art school training to use and built a model of the house. The project stalled, however, when he worked out what it would cost to engage an architect to create blueprints, on top of the funds required to buy a plot of land and sub-contract builders.

Young’s solution was to buy a ready-made home plan online. It cost him $1,000 and, after a few modifications for the hillside site he had secured, he used it to build his new home, to which he is now putting the finishing touches. Surrounded by trees in a neighbourhood of predominantly colonial-style houses, the three-bedroom, “retro-modern” home should be ready to move into this month. Young estimates he saved $22,000 (£13,750) on architect’s fees. He paid $325,000 for the land and the home cost $650,000 to build.

Like any new-build project, Young’s home had its share of challenges – securing permits, making 11th-hour alterations and handling negotiations with local conservation groups. He still can’t quite believe he has achieved his vision. “The jumping off point was getting the home plan. I couldn’t have done it otherwise,” he says.

Building a new home usually involves two choices: you find a model you like on a residential development under construction and perhaps customise it before it is completed to make it more to your taste; or you hire an architect to design your home from scratch. The latter requires a considerable financial outlay, which puts the option out of the reach of most people. Typically, a client pays an architect 15 per cent of the cost of their home. In the US, less than 3 per cent of new homes are architect built.

There is a third way that is emerging as an option for the design-savvy. As with Young’s case, it involves buying a pre-existing blueprint and a plot of land and putting up the house yourself or with the help of a builder.

Young bought his plan from houseplans.com, one of a new breed of companies that is creating innovative home designs, some commissioned from well-regarded architects, and using the internet to market them. They are banking on tapping into a growing demand for modern, even modernist, homes from a generation that takes design cues from the likes of Dwell magazine.

houseplans.com

The most well-known home plans are arguably those that were first made available in 1908 by US retailer Sears Roebuck & Company. Its Book of Modern Homesfeatured both plans and building materials and offered 44 house designs, ranging in price from $695-$4,115. Once a customer had chosen their style and placed an order – with a $1 deposit – it was only a few weeks before their home, in 30,000 separate pieces, would arrive, packed into two train boxcars, at the nearest train depot. “A 75-page, leather-bound instruction book told homeowners how to assemble those 30,000 pieces,” writes Rosemary Thornton in her book The Houses That Sears Built. “The book offered this sombre (and probably wise) warning: ‘Do not take anyone’s advice as to how this building should be assembled.’”

According to Thornton, the kit included 750lb of nails, 22 gallons of paint and varnish and 20,000 shingles for the roof and siding. Sears estimated in 1908 that a carpenter would charge $450 to assemble one of the homes. Many were also assembled by the new homeowner along with friends, relatives and neighbours, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn raisings of farming families.

The Sears Catalogue homes have been enjoying a revival recently, with fans seeking them out and prices rising accordingly. But the concept of home plans on which they were based has lost its allure over the past few decades. This can mainly be attributed to the paucity of interesting designs on the market. There is no shortage of companies selling plans – the US has several dozen – but many of the homes on offer resemble the type of cookie-cutter suburban house that can be bought built and ready to move into. The motivation for acquiring a plan and orchestrating an entire construction project has been lacking – particularly if you wanted something out of the ordinary or uncompromisingly modern. Developers have been slow to offer genuinely contemporary designs too.

“There has been a stigma attached to home plans,” concedes Stephen Williamson, chairman of houseplans.com. “They were seen as something cheap you might buy on the bottom shelf of Wal-Mart, and architects looked down at the idea.” Now, however, a significant number of well-known architects is signing up to create blueprints. The incentive can be financial: in the economic downturn many architects have seen their client base decline dramatically and home plans represent an additional, albeit modest, income stream. But the inducement can be more idealistic too. “For architects who strive towards the goal of affordable design for all – espoused by many modernists but achieved by only a few – home plans can be a way to put it into practice,” says Allison Arieff, author of The New York Times’s By Design column.

Hometta, a new online home plan company that specialises in modest, sustainable designs, opened in July. Founded by a builder and real-estate developer, Mark Johnson, and an architect, Andrew McFarland, and based in Houston, Texas, it says it wants to provide architect-designed homes for people who can’t afford architects. Its plans, most of which are for homes no bigger than 2,500 sq ft, sell for about $3,000 and are all penned by architects or designers. The portfolio includes Doug Garofalo, of Chicago-based Garofalo Architects, Far Frohn & Rojas, which has studios in Cologne, Santiago de Chile and Los Angeles, and Kiel Moe, whose two-bedroom “stacked house” is raised above ground on a series of shipping containers.

“The people who shop at Target, Ikea and Apple who are looking for clean, modern design: that’s our target market. The age of the McMansion is declining – I hope,” says Johnson, adding that the biggest hurdle his company faces is convincing customers they can do it on their own. “Building a house on your own land is a long journey involving lots of work,” he says. Hometta hopes to pave the way by providing construction guides – which it recommends customers read before they buy a plan – and eventually introducing resources on its website such as a nationwide network of builders.

Philadelphia architect Greg La Vardera also believes there is an emerging subset of homebuyers interested in building modern homes. He offers plans through his own firm, LaMiDesigns, and via houseplans.com. He was inspired by reading early issues of Dwell magazine, which launched in 2000, after which he started connecting with the magazine’s readers on its online forums. “From a design sense there’s a tremendous hole in the market and I saw home plans as a way of plugging that,” he says.

LaMiDesigns

One of La Vardera’s customers is Colin Smith, a building contractor in south-central Texas who specialises in interior remodels. Smith spent $1,500 on La Vardera’s Plat House plan and built the residence largely by himself with some help from his son, a carpenter. “I wasn’t crazy about the idea of a home plan when my wife first showed it to me,” he admits. But he’s happy with the result: a 1,492 sq ft open-plan home with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and decks on three sides. Smith estimates he spent $50,000 on construction costs and that the result is worth about $225,000.

Home-plan company FreeGreen focuses on smaller homes and offers some of its plans free. As its name implies, it also has an eye on sustainability. It says its homes are designed to perform 30-50 per cent better than prescriptive building codes on energy performance. An Open Source section on its website allows architects to showcase home plans but very few have yet been bought, according to FreeGreen’s own online counters.

Even plans that are purchased might end up gathering dust. “I can’t help wondering how many people buy with a vision of one day building their dream home and then hold on to them without actually doing it,” says Arieff.

At the moment, the renaissance in home plans appears to be concentrated in the US. Eighty per cent of houseplans.com’s online traffic is from the US and the lion’s share of its business is there too, although orders have come in from further afield. A UK customer in Bicester, Oxfordshire, central England, bought a blueprint for a traditional-style, five-bedroom, five-bathroom home “with elements from the European, luxury, French country style”. A master plan for such a house costs $1,299. Another order came in from Bermuda, for a $725 design for a 1,270 sq ft cottage with a wraparound front porch.

The home plan concept mirrors other current trends in home building – such as the revival of interest in prefabricated homes and the small-house lobby – which suggest there is a hunger for innovative ways to build homes. Customisation and sustainability often go hand in hand with these movements.

Arieff, for one, looks forward to a time when developers work together with home-plan companies. “Anything that brings the hand of the designer into home building is good,” she says. “And it would help scale up the dissemination of well-designed modern homes.”

California restaurants focus on suppliers

Financial Times, June 6 2009

The cocktails have been ordered, the birthday greetings extended. Now comes the complicated part – deciding what to order from the menu at Pizzaiolo, an acclaimed restaurant in Oakland, California, known for its blistered wood-fired pizzas and regional Italian specialties. The conversation among friends gathered for a celebratory dinner centres not on appetite or taste but on the intricacies of provenance.

A dish of braised goat prompts the most debate – the meat is listed as being from Bill Niman’s ranch in Bolinas, 50 miles north of Oakland. Niman’s humanely raised Niman Ranch beef was the darling of the foodie set for years. But Niman left the company and has started afresh with a small herd of grass-fed goats, as well as a young wife nicknamed Porkchop. So what about the goat? No one doubts it will have lived a good and healthy life. But has anyone tasted the squid pizza with aioli whose main ingredient was sourced just down the coast in Monterey Bay? Another diner is leaning towards the Becker Lane pork with cannellini beans, artichokes, fennel and spring onion salsa because he’s heard the pork from this organic farm is unequalled.

Such menu dissection is not uncommon among northern Californian diners. They are choosy and, invariably, knowledgeable about where their food comes from – a result of interaction with producers at farmers’ markets and the fact that restaurants routinely highlight the provenance of food on their menus. They also live in a fertile part of the world with a climate conducive to producing quality ingredients.

The focus on suppliers is not new. Its local pioneer was Alice Waters, owner and executive chef of the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant and café in Berkeley, who, along with her peers and protégés, has been interpreting farm-to-table cuisine for years, providing shout-outs on her menus to all her favoured producers.

Chez Panisse was also one of the first restaurants to proclaim unadulterated fruit a more than suitable dessert option. It has been featuring a simple offering – whether a single peach from Frog Hollow orchard in Brentwood or a bowl of Sparkling Red nectarines – on its menus for several years. Last month’s café menu listed a bowl of Pixie tangerines from Churchill-Brenneis Orchard and Medjool dates priced at $8.

In January, Todd Kliman, the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine, pondered on National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog: “Do we really need to know the provenance of an egg?” And more to the point: “Shopping is not cooking.”

Russell Moore, chef-owner of Camino in Oakland, agrees that there is a way of writing menus that can make them seem like shopping lists. He and his partner Allison Hopelain don’t put producers on the menu. “There isn’t a bigger supporter of farmers than me,” he says. “But ultimately it’s about customers liking the food.” Moore only serves organic or biodynamic wines and doesn’t touch refined sugar but neither of these facts is conveyed to diners. “I don’t want to come off as holier than thou,” he says.

A backlash against showcasing suppliers doesn’t seem likely. For those who live in one of the gastronomic capitals of the world, there is profound satisfaction in knowing that the lamb chop you are about to tuck into was not only raised humanely but done so on local pasture land by a farmer whose name you recognise.

There is no doubt that producers have taken on minor celebrity status. Chefs on both US coasts are discovering goat meat from sources such as Niman’s BN Ranch and Marin Sun Farms. Chef-owner Daniel Patterson at Coi in San Francisco is serving it with “sprouted beans, seeds, nuts and wheatgrass”.

Thomas Keller, owner of French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in New York, likes to highlight the fact that he uses yogurt made by Soyoung Scanlan at her Andante Dairy in Santa Rosa for his yogurt sorbet with a cream scone, sour cherry and proprietor’s blend tea foam. And Boulevard, one of San Francisco’s most venerated restaurants, is proud to proclaim that the quinoa used in its quail stuffed with duck merguez is from Rancho Gordo, a producer whose heirloom beans have become so well-known they have spawned a blog and a book.

They may not appear on his menu, but Moore at Camino is happy to name-check several producers he holds in high regard, including Annabelle at La Tercera, “whose chicory and shelling beans are superb”. Just don’t go to Camino any day soon expecting to eat chicken. If Soul Food Farm isn’t sending Moore its “spectacular” fowls, they’re off the menu. “We haven’t served chicken since November,” he says.

www.pizzaiolooakland.com
www.caminorestaurant.com
www.chezpanisse.com

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Who’s hot in California

Coffee
Ritual Roasters, along with Blue Bottle and Four Barrel, represent the new breed of San Francisco “artisanal micro-roasters”.

Chocolate
Scharffen Berger is closing down its Berkeley factory, so the mantle for best chocolates has been passed to Recchiuti in San Francisco. Also winning plaudits are edible chocolate boxes from Emeryville’s Charles Chocolates; and truffles from Oakland’s Sôcôla.

Dairy
Cream-top organic milk in distinctive glass bottles from Straus Family Creamery in Marin; French brothers David and Benoît de Korsak bring the concept of terroir to their creamy Saint Benoît organic yogurt made in Sonoma County; goat milk, yogurt, kefir and cheese from Sonoma’s Redwood Hill Farm.

Meat
Ducks from Liberty Ducks in Sonoma; lamb from Napa Valley Lamb Company and Cattail Creek Ranch; chickens from Mary’s Farm in Fresno, Hoffmans in the San Joaquin Valley and Soul Food Farm; quail from Wolfe Farm in Brentwood; goat meat from BN Ranch and Marin Sun Farms; guinea hens from Grimaud Farms in Stockton; hormone-free rabbit from Devil’s Gulch Ranch; pigs from River Dog Farm in Capay Valley.

Produce
Vegetables and herbs from Star Route Farms in Marin, Chino Ranch near San Diego and Cannard Farm and Greenstring, both in Sonoma; spring garlic from Full Belly Farm in Capay Valley; gold cipolini onions from Dirty Girl Produce in Santa Cruz; heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo in Napa; shelling beans from La Tercera in Bolinas; Frog Hollow Farm’s signature Cal Red peaches available at the Ferry Building Marketplace, San Francisco.

Cheese
Soft-ripened Mt Tam from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes; goat cheese from Petaluma’s Andante Dairy; award-winning cheddar from Modesto’s Fiscalini Cheese Co; raw-milk San Andreas sheep cheese from Bellwether Farms; Original Blue from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company.

Preserves
British expat June Taylor shows Californians how to make fruit butters and lemon marmalades at her workshop in Berkeley (www.junetaylorjams.com). Newer arrivals include Blue Chair Fruit, whose artisanal preserves are served at Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen for breakfast; and Loulou’s Garden in San Francisco.

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Financial Times, May 2, 2009

Elizabeth George is the author of many acclaimed novels of psychological suspense, including the Inspector Lynley mysteries, which have been adapted for television by the BBC. She won the Anthony award and Agatha award for Best First Novel in the US and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. Although she is American, most of her books are set in England, a country she fell in love with as a teenager and continues to visit regularly. George lives on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington state, near Seattle, US.

How did you end up building a home on Whidbey Island?
My husband, a retired firefighter, and I had settled on the Pacific north-west as the place we wanted to live. We wanted to be near to an international airport, so I could get over to England without too much difficulty. We also looked mostly at islands and small towns. I had lived in Huntington Beach [near Los Angeles] for 34 years but I was never a real southern Californian. I’m not a beach girl and I like big weather. We didn’t intend to build a home but when our real-estate agent called us and described these 10 acres on a bluff above the water, close to the town of Langley, we bought it sight unseen. This was in 2002 and it was the day before we were getting married.

Did you have a dream home in mind?
I had no idea where people even began designing houses. I had never built a home before. So I made sure to find a one-stop-shop architect, one who would put in the level of detail I needed – not least because I was designing it from 1,200 miles away in California. I favoured a traditional Cape Cod style with a shingle exterior. I made a scrapbook for Jed Miller, my architect, full of clippings from architecture and interiors magazines. And I compiled a list of all the things I wanted, such as a self-contained office and a workout room. I found a picture of a house and sent it to him with a note that said: “There isn’t anything about this house that I don’t like.” That was the jumping-off point.

Describe the house.
It is positioned so that every room has a different view, whether it’s the water, Mt Baker or the North Cascades [national park]. The sitting area of my office has a huge round window and it looks straight up the passage to Coupeville, which is 28 miles away. In the front entry there isn’t a dramatic stairway as you might expect. Instead the stairs are hidden. There’s an upper gallery for my black-and-white portrait photographs and the lower gallery has many of our landscape pastels by local artists. We have an English cottage-style walled garden and a gazebo for barbecuing. I love showing guests the potting shed because they always ask whether it’s a guest house. I tell them it’s Jed’s idea of a garden shed. It’s beautiful.

What’s your favourite room?
The home’s one defining room is the library. The bookcases are custom-made of cherrywood and they line three of the four walls. But my favourite is the upstairs sitting room, part of the master suite. On cold, rainy days I love to sit there with a fire going, to read or take a nap.

How did you choose the decor?
I have worked with interior designers before and part of the problem with them, bless their hearts, is they always want to rush off to the design centre to buy $5,000 chairs. I worked with a sales person at a good furniture store in Seattle. We spent four months choosing all the furniture and fabrics. We bought all our Asian rugs in Newport Beach, California. When it came time to choose our wall colours, we unrolled them in an underground parking garage in Seattle. We set up daylight lights and chose all the colours for each room. I was really nervous about it but it worked. My natural inclination is towards autumnal tones but with the guest house, which we finished in December, we went for a totally different look with yellow, green and the accent of violet. It’s in the woods so I wanted something brighter.

What’s Whidbey Island like?
There are only 1,100 people in Langley. I didn’t realise until we moved here that it’s the centre of the Whidbey Island Writers’ Association. It has two theatres, two orchestras and a jazz festival. There’s also an annual arts festival. There are so many artists on the south part of the island that you can’t throw a stone without hitting a watercolourist or sculptor. This is a very social community and I’ve had more parties here than I ever had in 34 years in Huntington Beach. But it’s casual. This past summer I wanted to have a gathering so that people could really enjoy the gardens before the winter set in but I couldn’t face the idea of throwing a huge party so I had a BYOE (bring your own everything) party. People brought wine or a picnic. We had croquet and ping-pong. It was wonderful.

Do you have a writing routine?
I start work at 6am. At the moment I’m making changes to the third draft of my 16th novel. I will stop at 8am so that I can spend one hour studying Italian before my assistant arrives. If I’m working on the rough draft of a new novel, I’ll usually work until about 11am.

Do you have any future projects for the property?
We hope to get access to the beach in some way; whether it’s with a tram or stairs, I don’t know. We keep two small boats there. But it’s tough because you don’t want to compromise the bluff in any way. We are also restoring the forest on the property – replacing invasive plants like blackberries and sage ivy and putting in natives such as ferns and huckleberry.

Do you miss your home when you’re away?
Since moving, I’ve reduced my travelling because it’s so lovely here. If I travel, I miss something. And I mean literally miss something, not in a nostalgic way but in the sense that I might not be there for something important like the big storm.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS

Figurines and portraits

My collection of whimsical English pottery figurines . Some are animals but most have a function too; they might be a vase or a planter. They are all secured in case of an earthquake and are absolutely adorable.

A portrait of George Harrison, my favourite Beatle, that hangs in my office. I got it by chance in San Francisco. I like portraits that show what the person is really like. This reveals a great deal of sensitivity and there’s a haunted element about the eyes.

I collect black-and-white photographic portraits and I have one of César Chávez that I saw in a coffee house. I tracked the photographer down and asked if he had a copy he would sell me.

I have seven oil paintings by the Chinese-American artist Zhao Kailin. I came across him in a gallery in Laguna Beach, California.

Then there’s my collection of miniature paintings from England, mostly of women and probably from the early 19th century. People carried them before photographs.

KIDS’ STUFF

Financial Times, June 7, 2008

Financial Times, November 1, 2008

Financial Times, December 13th 2008

Homebuyers are finding a blend of retail and residential property increasingly desirable, reports Tracey Taylor

For the past five years Christmas shopping has not been a problem for photographer Frank Anzalone. He simply rolls out of bed and walks out of his apartment directly into an open-air mall with 70 high-end shops, including Burberry, Sur La Table and Bang & Olufsen. His home is in Santana Row, a surburban retail-residential community that is increasingly being replicated around the US and the world.

“I enjoy this time of year when the lights sparkle and there is a fun holiday energy at the Row,” Anzalone says. “It feels more like a small hometown community than a bustling shopping mall and I really enjoy talking to the different merchants. It’s nice when you’re on a first-name basis and not treated as just another sale. People are friendly and the atmosphere is safe and comfortable. I hope to be here for another five-plus years.”

A few decades ago living above the shop was seen as a rather pedestrian existence; former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to cite the fact that she was born above her father’s grocery store in Grantham, Lincolnshire, eastern England, as a reminder of her humble roots. Now, however, residential and retail property are being blended together for the opposite reason. Developers are persuading homebuyers to see living above the shop as something to aspire to – especially when the establishment in question is operated by Gucci or Salvatore Ferragamo.

This phenomenon can be seen in new-build developments and regeneration projects around the world, especially in city centres. There are older neighbourhoods, such as Soho in Hong Kong and Le Marais in Paris, with apartments above trendy stores and restaurants, and modern malls with housing attached, such as Avenue K in Kuala Lumpur and Westfield in White City, London. Going forward, we can only expect more of the same. European developer Uplace, for example, wants to roll out its “experience destination” communities, where people can shop, work, play and live, to cities across the continent.

“The industrial age was marked by the construction of single-family homes [but] the hallmark of the new spatial fix will be denser use of land and increased compactness,” says Richard Florida, professor of business and creativity at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, whose latest book, Who’s Your City?, focuses on the “where to live” question. “The demand for central locations is motivated by people’s desire to conserve time – by eliminating commuting, for instance.”

But, perhaps not surprisingly, it is in the consumerist US where the retail-residential concept is really taking off. Developers are bringing it not just to cities but to towns and suburbs, manufacturing entirely new, upmarket communities around pre-packaged, open-air malls. Call it instant yet sanitised urbanism – with a focus on shopping.

Santana Row, five miles from the nearest city, San José, is an ideal case in point. Designed to resemble a large urban block with a main street running through the centre, it has 70 retailers, 20 restaurants, nine spas and salons and more than 1,000 residents on its 42-acre footprint. Having opened in 2002, it has become the go-to spot for young professionals looking for upmarket shopping, a vibrant restaurant scene, a buzzy nightlife and, crucially, a convenient place to live.

The location of the development is significant. San José is California’s third largest city and, as the capital of Silicon Valley with its concentration of high-tech industries and wealth, its inhabitants rank among those with the highest median incomes in the country. But it has long drawn unfavourable comparisons with San Francisco, 50 miles north, for its lack of animation. And, if anything, the vibrancy of Santana Row has exacerbated the situation, luring not only shoppers but also homebuyers with its promise of a new kind of community.

“I’m addicted to the convenience. Everything is at your fingertips,” says Casey De Carlo, a software company sales executive and former suburbanite who now lives in The Heights, a Santana Row apartment building flanking an open courtyard with a swimming pool. “I made more friends here in six months than in six years in the suburbs and I could write a book about what goes on around the hot tub,” he adds wryly.

To walk the streets of Santana Row is to confront a melange of architectural styles and cultural references. Jan Sweetman, a vice-president at developer Federal Realty, says designers were sent to France and Europe to source ideas before blueprints were drawn up. Several architects were contracted to work on different buildings to avoid a “Disneyland-type product”. There are fountains imported from Barcelona, grassy plazas, fragments of ironwork and distressed stucco from Tunisia and Italy and Gaudi-esque pillars encrusted with broken tiles. The façade of a 17th-century French chapel is affixed to the front of a wine bar.

At the heart of the community people sit under mature oak trees; there’s a fire pit, chess tables and live music. A concierge is on hand to make restaurant reservations or secure transportation and residents can also take advantage of a regular onsite farmers market, “mommy and me” events and jazz evenings. Staff seem to appear from nowhere to sweep up the first hint of a discarded coffee cup or ice cream wrapper. And the streets are patrolled 24/7 by private security firms in addition to being overseen by the San José police department. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it when reviewing the development in 2006: “It’s as if San José, having surpassed San Francisco in population, decided one day to catch up on the urban lifestyle thing but without the gridlock, the grime or the poor people.”

Carlos Dunlap, a former resident of Los Angeles who moved to northern California five years ago intending to settle in San Francisco, is now on his second Santana Row home. He first bought an open-plan loft, then switched to a three-level town house with views of the nearby hills. His office is a 10-minute drive away and he says he loves the fact the Row is both “immaculate” and safe. “There’s something going on here all the time for everybody,” he says.

Property prices vary depending on size and location. A three-bedroom, two-and-a half bathroom, 2,161 sq ft town house across the street from The Valencia, the development’s boutique hotel, is listed at $1.8m while $3.3m will buy an extra 1,600 sq ft, cathedral ceilings and a balcony and terrace. Monthly rental rates for flats range from $2,700 to $4,000.

Federal Realty has built several other surburban retail-residential developments on the US east coast, including the Village at Shirlington and Pentagon Row, both in Virginia, and Bethesda Row in Maryland. And the formula is being mirrored all over California. Outside Los Angeles, in Glendale, there is the Americana at Brand, marrying high-end stores such as Tiffany & Co and Barneys, luxury condominiums and the amenities of a five-star resort, in a project that developer Rick Caruso says was inspired by Newbury Street in Boston. And west of San Francisco in Emeryville there is Bay Street, a development where more than 1,000 residents live above 60 retailers, 10 restaurants and a 16-screen cinema.

These new communities don’t appeal to everyone. Former suburbanities can be put off by the crowds, says Mike Pynn, residential manager at Santana Row. “Some of our first customers thought they wanted the urban experience but then complained about the noise and left,” he says. And, perversely for a place focused on walkability, most outsiders arrive by car, keeping valet parking attendants busy.

Those used to a traditional city will have the opposite problem. As John King, architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, points out, Santana Row and its sisters are “artificial urbanity”. “For people who define the idea of a cosmopolitan urban scene as essentially a stage set to live the sort of life they want to live, it’s a terrific stage set,” he says. But “it’s not part of San José. It’s like suburbia with an urban jolt. If it was parachuted into lower Manhattan there would be a sense of ‘Why do we want it?’” Even residents of a small town might question where the post office, fire station and library are.

Richard Florida also thinks manufactured “urban villages” are better if they are linked to a historic neighbourhood, rather than “out in the middle of nowhere”. He points to SouthSide Works in Pittsburgh, which saw the addition of high-end housing units, retailers and restaurants to an old mill site, and the Distillery District in Toronto, a pedestrian-only village with Victorian architecture that dates back to 1832, as examples.

But it’s difficult to argue with Santana Row’s thriving retail trade and 98 per cent residential occupancy rate. And the development is expanding: construction began on a 95,000 sq ft glass-and-steel building for offices and more retail space this summer.

Whether growth can be maintained in the current economic downturn remains to be seen. But Pynn is optimistic. He says he still gives regular tours of the Row to goverment officials and developers from all over the US who say they are looking for inspiration on how to fashion the perfect community. “Everyone wants their MTV and everyone wants their Santana Row,” he says.