L.A. at Home

New home for L.A. at Home

2012-07-17T15:45:18-07:00

Readers, L.A. at Home has a new location: http://www.latimes.com/features/home/

The Scout: What's new on Pico Boulevard

2012-07-13T08:22:00-07:00

Here in the land of shopping malls and stacked garages, it's easy to get excited about an L.A. district where you can park on the street. And walk.

But that’s just one of many reasons why a day spent in Picfair Village is so enjoyable. Long known for auto body shops and hair salons, the stretch of Pico Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea avenues now stands out for its eclectic — and growing — mix of stores and restaurants with sidewalk seating.

“When I came here, it was myself, Sky’s Tacos, Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles and CJs,” said Pinky Rose Charles, who opened her clothing boutique Pinky Rose nine years ago among the restaurants. “Melrose was so saturated I decided to move south.”

PHOTO GALLERY: Pico Boulevard shopping

The stretch of Pico Boulevard had long been predicted to be the next big shopping district, but the renaissance that Charles and others had hoped for was slow to transpire. Only in the last year have four design stores opened, all within a few blocks of one another. A new development, Pico Hauser Plaza, is slated to open this year.

The mix includes Pilates studios, the kosher and gluten-free Breakaway Bakery, an Eco Dog Wash, Mike's Bike and Skateboard Shop, and Cordially Invited, a stationery and gift store that also has a Southern Girl Desserts cupcake bar and ice cream by the scoop from Fosselman’s, the popular Alhambra parlor.

“There is an element of what is current right now in this neighborhood,” said Erin Adams, who opened Brainworks Home in May. Like many store owners, Adams lives in the neighborhood and augments her art consulting business in the back with her elegant storefront featuring vintage wallpaper, doorknobs, switch plates and other hardware, as well as decorative objects and rehabilitated mid-century furniture such as Marcel Breuer Wassily chairs.

Other new stores include Bleu Moon, owner Saras Naidu’s handpicked antique teak furnishings and gifts from India. Also, Herman Schwartz, owner Larry Cylinder’s mix of mid-century furniture, contemporary artworks and “oddities” — an 18th century fencing helmet, for example, and hand-painted ceramic hat and wig holders.

Young entrepreneurs Sung Choi and Pete Arbelaez opened Our Favorite Shop four months ago. The striking interior is composed of cool, movable, modular plywood boxes to display Clae footwear for men (also found at Barneys and Nordstrom), clothing accessories, unusual books, CDs (yes, that’s right) and movies.

As you’re window shopping, you’ll also come upon La Maison du Pain, Bloom Cafe and Chic wine bar. The popular neighborhood cafe, dance studio and gift gallery Paper or Plastik updated its menu this month.

“You will see every kind of person in this neighborhood,” said Don Sanfre, who opened the vintage home decor store Pico Modern five years ago. “It is more cosmopolitan than most.”

-- Lisa Boone

Corrected: An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of a former partner in Our Favorite Shop. His name is Pete Arbelaez, not Rabelaez.

Photos, from top: Brainworks Home, Pico Modern, Herman Schwartz, Paper or Plastik. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

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Bow & Truss North Hollywood: Modern design, to go

2012-07-12T09:13:29-07:00

Bow & Truss, the new North Hollywood restaurant and lounge crafted from what had been an auto body garage, may not sound like the kind of place with design elements that could translate to a residential environment. But as envisioned by Beth Holden, principal of the West Hollywood architecture studio New Theme, in collaboration with her client, Morgan Margolis of Knitting Factory Entertainment, the updated 1930s building will indeed hold some design solutions with high visual impact that diners just might bring home.

The restaurant, scheduled to have its grand opening Friday, has a stunning showpiece: a richly patterned bar that's actually just formaldehyde-free medium density fiberboard, or MDF, finished with paint that’s low in volatile organic compounds. The pattern, inspired by the jali screenwork common in Islamic design, was cut with a router by hand, then set on sanded plexiglass backed with dimmable LEDs. This particular pattern may be intricate, but the concept and simple materials could be deployed as an accent wall, adding ambient light to a stairwell or entryway. At Bow & Truss, the geometric cuts of the MDF are meant to blend with the restaurant's Spanish bent and with Southern California's architectural traditions.

"We studied different patterns and abstracted it to look a little more modern,” Holden said. “We wanted it to have that cross-referencing."

Holden's husband and business partner, Wolfgang Melian, fabricated all of the custom pieces including built-in benches, barstools and concrete counters. Melian resourcefully used the MDF cutouts to give pattern to custom concrete tiles, including one used on an outdoor table, pictured here.

Another potential DIY idea: To save on budget, Holden decided to camouflage an existing metal fence rather than replace it. Melian's addition of boards and a coat of black paint to the upper portion helped to change the scale of the fence and make it feel less imposing. Lower horizontal wood strips then help the barrier blend with the rest of the restaurant's design.

Bow & Truss is at 11122 Magnolia Blvd. The restaurant is having its soft opening now and its grand opening on Friday.

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-- Jessica Ritz

Photos: Alen Lin

Huauzontle, a Mexican staple in L.A. edible gardens

2012-07-10T10:55:36-07:00

You can find huauzontle in the produce section of large supermarkets throughout Mexico, the bunches of thin stalks topped with hundreds of green flower buds. The sprigs are best blanched, tied in a bundle, wrapped with Oaxacan string cheese and dipped in an egg-flour-water batter for deep-frying like chile rellenos. You don’t need a fork. You eat it like a crispy vegetarian hot dog on a stick, drizzled with a simple tomato sauce.

Which explains why gardeners here are growing their own huauzontle. Although the plant's cousin, lambsquarters (Chenopodium albun), is considered an invasive weed by many, huauzontle (Chenopodium berlandieri, subspecies nuttalliae) is semi-domesticated.

Huauzontle looks a bit like a broccoli rabe but is not so easy to use. The younger leaves can be cooked like spinach, but as huauzontle matures and sends out the highly prized flower buds, the leaves get bitter. The stems are inedible too.

You can strip boiled buds from the stalks and press the cheese around them, forming a croquette for frying. A Yucatecan variation is a simple salad: boiled buds tossed with cooked new potatoes and a vinaigrette. (You can read Jonathan Gold's take on huauzontle and how it factors into his review of Bizzara Capital in Whittier, and though recommendations on how to use the plant are scarce, we should point out that huauzontle fan Diana Kennedy’s book “From My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients” does have some ideas.)

Gardeners at the Rosewood and Stanford-Avalon community gardens in L.A. harvest the young, sweet leaves early in the season but then let the plants grow to reach 6 feet or more, waiting for a midsummer harvest of the immature flower buds.

Like chipilín and papalo, huauzontle is a type of quelite, the wild greens of Mesoamerica. This is not a plant you’re likely to find in a nursery, but seeds are available online. Sources include Seeds of Change and J.L. Hudson. If you want to sample huauzontle before you plant it, you can find it in Northgate Markets in Southern California.

Nery Reyes, the garden manager at Rosewood Community Garden, says he had never eaten huauzontle until a gardener added it to a plot there.

“I’m from Guatemala and this is from Mexico,” he said. “But we had a lot of it last season, so I ate it. It was good.”

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-- Jeff Spurrier

The Global Garden, a look at our multicultural city through the lens of its landscapes, usually appears here on Tuesdays. For an easy way to follow future installments, join our Facebook page for Gardening in the West.

Photos: Ann Summa

Review: Insteon remote-control LED light bulb

2012-07-10T08:28:00-07:00

The dream of a fully technology integrated and automated home can make a tech geek downright giddy: coffee machines that grind coffee and brew at a set hour, power sockets with built-in USB outlets, steaks cooked medium rare thanks to a Bluetooth thermometer. For every person who thinks a thermostat that learns personal temperature preferences is excessive, there's a tech geek who calls that cool.

Take the new LED bulb by Insteon. Released a couple of weeks ago, this bulb can be turned on, off or dimmed by remote control (included with bulb) or by iOS and Android apps. It's the next step in automating your home lighting: No special lamp attachments needed, no dimmer plates to attach to your wall. The bulb and remote communicate via radio frequency.

We tested the device and found installation to be simple. Hold down a button on the remote until it beeps, screw in the lightbulb, then wait for a confirmation double-beep from the remote and bulb. The setup worked the first time we tried. At $29.99, the Insteon bulb presents an easy, albeit limited, alternative to much more expensive home automation systems.

The remote can be programmed to turn on any number of Insteon bulbs within a 50-foot range. Each bulb is assigned to one of four buttons on the remote, so, for example, one button could turn on all the lights in the entry and living room, and other buttons could manage lighting in the kitchen, master bedroom and kid's room.

In our tests, the bulb performed best in a table lamp and in recessed lighting -- places where directed light is useful. In a torchiere floor lamp, the range of light was limited.

The brightness of the 8-watt LED bulb is said to be comparable to a 60-watt incandescent. The drawback, however, is the dimming function. Without the tactile nature of a manual dimmer dial, we found it is difficult to manipulate the lighting levels. On/off, no problem. But reaching certain sweet spots -- 50% or 75% brightness, for example -- was an issue. The bulb quickly skipped to 100% on or 100% off.

But if you're hooked on the concept, the Insteon bulb could be your gateway drug to more sophisticated home automation. The $129.99 Insteon Central Controller -- a sort of power hub that plugs into a wall outlet -- lets you skip the remote and instead manipulate Insteon bulbs via your smartphone.

Want to go even further with your home automation? Insteon also sells ApplianceLinc, which allows you to program and manage appliances, TVs, sprinklers and more via computer or smartphone.

Insteon said its bulb will lasts for 50,000 hours. Have it on for eight hours a day, and that's a life span of about 17 years.

The product is proof that automated lighting is moving beyond custom homes to a broader market of consumers looking for off-the-shelf solutions. The caveat here is that one bulb isn't really enough to enjoy the benefits of an automated system. Our advice? Go for a full room or a whole house, or don’t bother.

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-- Dianne de Guzman

Photos: Insteon

American Craftsman meets Swiss chalet in Pasadena

2012-07-06T09:29:16-07:00

A dentist named Francis K. Ledyard paid $10,000 to the Milwaukee Building Co. — the firm best known for Grauman's Chinese Theatre — for his two-story, four-bedroom house. Believed to be the only home like it in Pasadena, it sported furry, bark-on redwood logs, russet-stained redwood shake siding and a white limestone chimney — an American Craftsman with a touch of Swiss chalet.

That was 1909. By the time architect Douglas Ewing spotted the house in 2003, the defining log trim was gone, the house had been painted brown and the kitchen and bathrooms had undergone Midcentury Modern remodels.

PHOTO GALLERY: Log Craftsman in Pasadena

But Ewing, who grew up among Pasadena's Craftsman bungalows and worked for Case Study architect Whitney Smith, had by then designed several Adirondack-style projects, including a Colorado ski lodge for Ralph Lauren.

“I fell in love with log buildings,” Ewing said. So he and his wife, Maggie, decided to buy the house, warts and all.

Negotiations fell through, however, and the house wound up back on the market. Enter Faith Dymek and her husband, Mark, who were moving from Virginia. They brought with them daughter Ryanne; Faith's mother, Sharon McCabe; plus Arts and Crafts furniture that had never looked quite right in their old Colonial-style home.

The couple bought the “falling-down, ramshackle, termite-ridden house” in 2004, Faith said, figuring a little elbow grease was all they needed to fix it up. Then they met Ewing, who explained the difference between making the house livable and bringing it back to life as originally designed. The latter, he said, would require more time, more money and more expertise.

The Dymeks' decision?

“We decided we would restore versus renovate,” Faith said.

To economize, she served as general contractor, visiting the job site daily and gathering leads on local artisans.
“This town has a wealth of incredible craftsmen,” she said. “They don't all have business cards or websites, but people know people who know the perfect guy. Word of mouth is not to be underestimated.”
Other times, complete strangers volunteered information. A real estate agent offered a photocopy of a 1911 article about the house from American Homes and Gardens magazine. The detailed description and black-and-white photos revealed that a second-floor sleeping porch had been enclosed and that log pergolas once covered the front porch and a side garden.

A color image of the house materialized when a local painter dropped off a copy of a vintage postcard. And a previous resident stopped by to share what she knew, which included the markings on a door frame that are believed to be the heights of the Ledyard children.

When work began in 2005, replacing the dry-stacked brick foundation was the priority and took seven months. Ewing hoisted up the house to remove the loose bricks, then poured concrete.

“All that had held the house up was its own weight and gravity,” he said.

To rehab the rustic exterior, Ewing tapped Montana Idaho Log & Timber in Victor, Mont. Redwood logs were no longer available, so the company supplied bark-off natural turned pine logs. Over five months, 400 to 500 logs meeting Ewing's specifications were cut, numbered and labeled, then trucked south, where two craftsmen spent three months re-creating the pergolas and timber trim.

Inside, Ewing left the den and living and dining rooms intact but updated the kitchen, turned the maid's room into a laundry room and grafted on a breakfast porch out back. Upstairs, he sacrificed a bedroom to create a bathroom and more storage. The sleeping porch was enclosed anew, but this time Ewing recessed the walls to give the illusion of the original open balcony.

The rest of the lot features a new pond-like swimming pool, an outbuilding converted into a guest cottage for Faith's mother and a modern garage that replaced a barn Faith remembers being “held up with chicken wire and vines.”

Paul Haywood and Chris Kidd still spend months at a time refinishing doors, windows and shingles, and applying sunscreen and conditioner to preserve those picturesque logs.

“We didn't need to do all that we did, but we felt it was our responsibility to put the house back together the way it was.” Faith said. “After the extraordinary investment we made, the thought of not keeping the place up is unthinkable.”

CRAFTSMAN DESIGN: GO-TO RESOURCES FOR THIS HOUSE

Faith Dymek sought out a long list of fixtures, fabrics and information resources to restore her family's house in keeping with its original Craftsman aesthetic:

Crown City Hardware in Pasadena: “We wanted latches and hinges for several new windows to match the 1909 hardware,” Dymek said. “I set out hoping to come close, but Crown had the exact pieces — in stock.”

Historic Lighting in Monrovia: “Historic helped us create custom outdoor lanterns and a dining room chandelier that combines mahogany framing made locally with glass shades handblown in San Francisco.”

Archive Edition Textiles in Hawthorne: “Archive had period fabrics to reupholster sofas and make bedspreads, pillows and table runners.”

American Bungalow magazine: “The directory of advertisers is awesome, and the articles detailing restorations all over the U.S. are great.”

Craftsman Weekend Exposition Show & Sale: Pasadena Heritage's annual event is scheduled for Oct. 19 to 21 this year. “Amazing resource,” Dymek said. “I met artisans from around the country who knew how to approach stripping our woodwork and staining our replacement shingles.”

Gamble House in Pasadena: “I went on tour after tour and studied the casement window treatments, then had similar ones made of wood for our daughter's room.”

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-- Emily Young

Photos: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

DIY speed bumps: Traffic control for neighborhoods

2012-07-06T08:09:39-07:00

Take note, drivers who treat pretty much any stretch of asphalt as a highway despite the kids, the pets or the speed limits: Throughout neighborhoods far and wide, fed-up residents are reclaiming their streets, or at least trying to. It’s something of a global obsession, actually, and the solutions go far beyond the much derided speed hump, which some traffic experts say actually encourages bursts of speeding between the braking.

In West Vancouver, Canada, traffic safety groups painted holograms on the ground so that as cars approached, a child appeared to rise from the ground. (Never mind that detractors have said the holograms could cause cars to swerve and hit something real.)

In London, artist Steven Wheen converts potholes into miniature versions of English gardens. The idea: guerrilla landscaping as traffic-calming tool.

Here in Southern California, some other strategies are gaining traction:
SIGNS
Dava Waite lives on a relatively quiet dead-end street in Sherman Oaks, so when cars peel up and down, she’s pretty sure that they’re residents. “It makes me cringe,” Waite said. “We have people, babies and dogs hiking that street all day long, and I never understood how someone could go that fast without thinking about the safety of their own neighborhood.” So last year Waite hung signs that had messages such as, “Slow down. You’re almost home!”

The result: “The signs have helped a little, and other neighbors have loved having them,” Waite said. Now she wants to hang a banner that screams: “No squirrel should die on this street! Please slow down!”

MURAL

Joe Linton, artist and organizer for the L.A. walking and biking event CicLAvia, has lived by the busy intersection at Koreatown’s Eco Village apartment building for 16 years. He rallied neighbors to paint an enormous road mural in 2005. After the road was repaved in 2009, Linton and about 100 others took to the street again, repainting the brightly colored, Olympic-pool sized creation. Linton, pictured here, said he asked City Council members for support but was denied a permit. He moved forward anyway.

The result: “I think it really works to slow cars down,” Linden said of the mural at the T intersection of Bimini Place and White House Place. He said the artwork helps to take drivers out of their typical “just-have-to-get-to-their-destination” frame of mind and makes them realize that “streets are public spaces where people can really interact. This was a way of reclaiming some of that space back for people who aren’t in cars.” The paint faded over time, Linden said, so “we refreshed it and added new parts last March.”

SCREAMING

Then there are the screamers, fictional or otherwise. Take Claire Dunphy, played by Julia Bowen, pictured above with Ty Burrell, who plays husband Phil on "Modern Family." In Season 2 of the sitcom, the “Modern” mom used a bullhorn to try to shame a repeat offender on her street.

Real-life vigilante Eric Lapidus routinely shouts at drivers flying down his tree-lined Spaulding Square avenue.

The result: Sometimes people do slow down, Lapidus said. But is the occasional victory worth the vocal cord strain? “Hardly,” Lapidus said. “But it helps relieve the anger I feel when I see people blasting down our street when kids are playing ball just a few feet from them.”

LOBBYING

Valet drivers turned writer Stephen Box into something of a traffic activist. They used his street near Hollywood Boulevard as fast access to parking, so he complained to his city councilman, the council district office and then the police. Finally he just walked to Hollywood Boulevard and talked the valet drivers directly.

The result: “No matter how much they might understand my situation, the truth is that they’re going to get yelled at if they’re late getting the cars back,” Box said. He his wife, Enci, who have an infant, said their street remains a valet highway come sunset. But Box hasn’t given up. He now teaches classes and is a board member at Sustainable Streets, a nonprofit that aims to promote biking and pedestrian solutions. He went to Sacramento to push for the “Safe Streets” bill (AB 766), which aims to give local communities more authority over speed limits.

PARKLETS

Even people who live in more commercial areas are attempting to slow the pass of speeding vehicles. Valerie Watson, an urban designer who lives in downtown L.A., is working with a group of residents to spearhead the development of “parklets” along some of the area’s busiest streets. (Pictured here: one planned for downtown later this year.) “Parklets can take up just one of two metered parking spaces where you can create a small area with seats and plantings. The way we like to put it is that we’re colonizing part of the public realm for people instead of cars.”

The result: A parklet program was developed in San Francisco, and residents said that as drivers see human activity in their peripheral vision, it slows them down. Will parklets work in L.A.? It remains to be seen.

TREES

Deborah Murphy, an urban designer and chairwoman of L.A.’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee, supports many forms of “traffic calming,” including more stop signs and better designed crosswalks. One subtle solution: lining streets with trees. The canopy works to “condense the drivers’ view and tends to make them drive slower,” she said.

The result: In England, a parish council in Norfolk rejected expensive speed cameras and instead played with driver’s peripheral vision. As cars approached the village, trees planted at shorter intervals created the illusion that the landscape was zipping past at a faster rate. Some drivers, in turn, did slow down.

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-- Alexandria Abramian Mott

Photo credits: "Modern Family" images from Season 2, Episode 11 / ABC; street sign photos from Dava Waite; Joe Linton and Eco Village mural by Arkasha Stevens / Los Angeles Times; valet parking by Los Angeles Times; parklet rendering from Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Complete Streets Working Group; tree-lined street by Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times

Papalo in the garden: A wild 'summer cilantro'

2012-07-03T07:14:00-07:00

Thanks to its tolerance for heat, this garden green is sometimes called "summer cilantro." Bolivian coriander is another name, although it’s not at all related to that herb. No, this plant -- papalo (Porophyllum ruderale) -- is actually part of the daisy family and originated in South America, predating the arrival of Asian coriander by thousands of years.

Papalo is a type of quelite, the wild greens of Meso-America, and it's popular among the Quechua of Bolivia as well as the people of southern Mexico. In restaurants in Puebla state, it’s common to find a sprig of papalo stuck in a vase on the table, next to the salt, pepper and salsas -- ready to be added raw to soups, tacos, tortas or beans.
Eating papalo with carnitas or carne asada is a tasty way to settle the stomach, said Pedro Barrera, a board member of the Stanford-Avalon Community Garden in L.A., where members grow it in rows. Some people also eat it for high blood pressure, Barrera said. He is a native of Jalisco state, on Mexico’s west coast, where the plant grows wild.
“They don’t eat it there because it smells too strong,” he said. But Barrera? He’s a convert. “I like the flavor a lot.”

Papalo, like cilantro, is an acquired taste for some. Its added raw to dishes, at the last minute, lending a piquant flavor that hints of cilantro, arugula, cucumber and citrus. It's used with fresh papaya and in fish dishes, salsas and guacamole, but it has a stronger bouquet than true cilantro -- partly why when used in place of cilantro, cooks often use only about one-third as much.

The combination of a unique taste and hardiness in heat has made it a favorite among many, including chefs. According to the magazine Herb Companion, Alice Waters became a fan more than a dozen years ago when she encountered the leaf at an American Institute of Wine and Food festival. She bought all the seeds she could find for the Chez Panisse garden.

In the garden, papalo likes full sun, good drainage and a bit of room, although it does well in containers. It can typically get 4 to 5 feet high, depending on the variety. Small holes may appear in the mature leaves; what looks like insect damage actually are porous oil glands where the aromatic oils vaporize. Seeds are available online from www.egardenseed.com and www.sandmountainherbs.com.

-- Jeff Spurrier

The Global Garden, a look at our multicultural city through the lens of its landscapes, usually appears here on Tuesdays. For an easy way to follow future installments, join our Facebook page for gardening in the West.

Papalo grows thick at the Stanford Avalon Community Garden in Los Angeles.

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Photos: Ann Summa

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

2012-07-02T19:47:29-07:00

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:

"Deliciously snobby handmade gourmet donuts" is how Gudelj describes her Donut Snob creations. She had attended culinary arts classes at Los Angeles Trade Technical College for only a semester when her business took off this June. Gudelj may be too young to have known the doughnut drawers of the old Helms Bakery trucks, which explains why she calls her operation "the first and only doughnut home delivery service in L.A. County." Her menu includes the Dinker (a maple-bacon donut), Berry Beat (a cinnamon glaze with a mixed berry coulis) and the Razy Lemon Lulu (a raised donut with lemon zest glaze and raspberry coulis). Price: $3 each.

Francisco and Chrystal Velez developed their craft from a desire to have a garden in their San Pedro apartment, though they had no yard or terrace. In his spare time, Francisco, a home remodeler, cuts metal strips and rivets them into shape; then he adds soil and succulents tied to a chicken wire frame. The result: green wall sculpture that is easy to maintain. "You just have to spray it once a week," Chrystal said.

The couple's other work consists of leather, glass and wood terrariums, $15 to $250, filled with a combination of sand, stone, shells and succulents. The couple, pictured here, are working under the name Native Desert Plant Designs. They don't have a website yet but can be reached at (310) 955-0431 or through Facebook.

Gus Lopez learned how to tie more than 75 knots attending Tongue Point Job Corps, a vocational seaman training program in Oregon. Away for three months at a time working as mate on an Alaska tug, "I use to sit in my room and tie knots for hours to keep from getting bored," he said.

His current three-day-a-week tug job allows time to fashion functional nautical artwork of complex knots, such as an oval rope door mat ($45), monkey fist knot key chains ($9 to $11) and square knot dog leashes ($25). In his Knotical Art booth, you can watch as he transforms three strands of nylon line, a marble and a small metal shackle into a key chain. If you ask nicely, he can make you one with his eyes closed.

Justin Deines, pictured here, learned saddle making and leather repair from his dad, a harness maker for Disneyland for 30 years. Lisa Buswell's mother taught her to crochet for the first time at age 6. They met when a friend gave Buswell one of Deines' carved, flower-bracelets.

"I contacted him on Facebook, we talked and later he made some buttons for my infinity scarves," she said. Last August they decided to combine their respective crafting talents into Lint & Buttons,
a fusion of leather-and-crochet fashion accessories.

"It makes our pieces more unique than just simple crochet or leather work," Buswell said. Items include leather-and-crochet earrings ($20) and necklaces ($30), carved card cases ($25 to $45) and leather headbands ($15).

Judy King-Wagner's passions are sewing and spending time teaching her grandkids -- all 22 of them -- how to cook. "I always double the recipe so they learn some math too," the retired nurse said, adding that she began making aprons for her grandchildren two years ago. ("My grandson insisted I start an apron company and put me on Facebook," she said.) Her cotton aprons come with a handmade tin cookie cutter. Shown here: a Holsten-Hereford cow apron with mini-cow cookie cutter and the Birthday Apron with a party hat cookie cutter. Kids aprons are $22 to $30; adult aprons are $30 to $42.

Paoling Che has been making candles since she was 14. Her day job is designing websites, but working under the name Kokocandles she crafts paraffin candles in the shape of macaroons and cupcakes with scents of vanilla, sweet frosting and chocolate. One bodacious 7-inch cupcake ($99) took 5 pounds of wax to make and is the size of your head. Pictured here: Che with her macaroni and cheese candle kit ($34).

Carla Ortega's papier-mâché sculptures start with a drawing. With a plan in place, she covers a wire form with strips of newspaper dipped in a flour-and-water-paste. After that dries, she paints and accessorizes the figures. "It can take a month-and-a-half to make a single piece," she said, holding up a 30-inch-tall Day of the Dead flamenco dancer ($150) for inspection. Also available: Day of the Dead-motif pins ($10) and picture frames ($15 to $17). Ortega works under the name Our Creations.

Food trucks kept opening day crowds well fed. The crafts marketplace will be open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays, and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The address for Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles is 112 E. 22nd St., San Pedro.

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San Pedro reinventing itself

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Try This: Making your own bronze sculpture

The Revival of York Boulevard in Highland Park

-- Barbara Thornburg

Photos: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Summer style: Outdoor chairs that strike a chord

2012-06-29T11:31:45-07:00

We're calling them airy chairs: outdoor seats whose wire or cord construction makes for an easy, breezy sensibility — the it look of summer, light in silhouette but not on style. We've chosen a sampling of chairs in a range of prices. Higher-end designs tend to have more refinements: Ligne Roset’s Fifty chair and ottoman, pictured here, has a steel frame that has been treated to protect against corrosion and lacquered in polyester so it’s cool to touch (no sear marks on thighs, thank you very much). Nearly 1,150 feet of UV-resistant polypropylene rope are strung into a cool silhouette that cocoons you in comfort. The Ligne Roset chair retails for $1,435, the ottoman for $525, but we have some other picks that are as much a comfort to your wallet as they are to your back and feet.

From left: Valentina, whose slatted seat floats on a breezy steel-tube frame, is on clearance at CB2. Originally $179, it’s $69.95 while supplies last. The black Antwerp chair from Viva Terra, $389, spins its web from recycled metal. Then there's the Högsten outdoor armchair, IKEA’s modern riff on rattan, with the polyethylene seat woven around a steel frame powder-coated in white polyester. It's $89.99. Photo credits, from left: CB2, Viva Terra, IKEA.
Get happy as a Clam chair, a steel seat in optimistic midcentury colors. It’s $275 at Potted in Atwater Village. Photo credit: Luke Janela / Potted.

Working for the Italian manufacturer Gervasoni, design icon Paola Navone created the InOut collection, which we saw premiered at the Milan furniture fair.

The aluminum-framed chairs and chaises are strung with cloud-white polypropylene cord or glossy white PVC slats. For pricing and availability, Gervasoni’s U.S. representative: www.imoderni.com.

Photo credits: Gervasoni.

New for 2012: the Kobi chair designed by Patrick Norguet. The steel shell sits atop enameled aluminum or oak-veneered aluminum legs, with cushions in three styles. Prices start at $633 through Suite New York. Photo credit: Suite NY.

L.A.-based Bend Seating’s wire chairs are the hot pick of summer. Since we first featured the hand-welded designs more than a year ago, designer Gaurav Nanda’s collection has taken off.

The collection has expanded to include four wire patterns, three colors and one version that’s an indoor-outdoor counter stool. Readers also made it the top vote-getter in our poll to declare the California look of 2011, a follow-up to an L.A. Times feature declaring the California look back in 1961.

The Bend chairs are $450 to $495, with optional cushions for $35 to $49. We're still digging the orange, right, as well as Bend's new wire trophy heads. Photo credits: Bend Seating.

At left: Sixties is the apt name for the woven resin chair from the French design firm Fermob, which recently released Sixties as a bench too. The chair comes in four color combinations and is $488 through Yliving.com. At right: The Acapulco Rocker’s vinyl cord is strung on a steel frame, like a hammock in chair form. Sway in a choice of 11 colors. The suggested retail is $480, and it's sold through Weego Home in Santa Monica, Haus USA in Los Angeles, Inside Out 365 in Costa Mesa and manufacturer Innit. Photo credits, from left: Fermob, Innit.

Venice designer Ilan Dei premiered his Cord Collection of outdoor furnishings last month. Vinyl cord in a range of hues wraps powder-coated steel tubing. The sofa, $2,999, can be complemented with an ottoman, dining chair or bench, some of which can be seen in our original post on the collection's premiere.

The lounge chair, $799, at left, can be complemented with an ottoman, sofa, dining chair or bench.

Photo credits: Ashley Hetrick.

For a more organic look, California-based Henry Hall Designs has a new design called Serene, made of an all-weather synthetic fiber woven by hand onto a teak frame.

The lounge chair is pictured at right. The chaise, above, is stackable, as is the dining chair and side table.

The pieces can be ordered through Egg & Dart Home in Los Angeles.

Photo credits: Henry Hall Designs.

And finally, The Oyler Wu Collaborative showed prototypes of its indoor-outdoor furniture. Jenny Wu said the prototype chaise is made of polypropylene rope and power-coated steel for outdoor use, but the studio is looking at other rope options. Photo credit: Oyler Wu.

CORRECTED: An earlier version of this post misspelled Fermob as Fernmob.

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-- Lisa Boone and Craig Nakano

Photo credit, top: Ligne Roset.