Starting concurrently with this week’s Art Nite on Thursday is the return of the four-day Design Healdsburg, produced by Design Bay Area. It’s in a class with similar North Bay Design weekends in San Francisco and Marin, and once again Healdsburg claims a strong centerpiece for a four-day festival. Visitors are urged to “Experience Healdsburg through the lens of design,” the weekend’s title.
“It’s basically a design week,” said Dawn Zidonis, CEO and co-founder of Design Bay Area. “San Francisco Design Week, Milan Design Week. San Francisco Design Week has been around for 20 years, and I don’t know how long Milan has been around, but it’s been a pretty long time.”
According to Jonathan Pearlman, local architect and a passionate ambassador for the concept, “They happen in cities around the world. Right now there’s an Oslo Design Week. They have them in London, in Paris, all over the world.”
He leads a seminar in Design Healdsburg, moderates another and offers his modernist home up for inspection during the Oct. 1-4 event.
“What we see here in Healdsburg is a good concentration of creative people in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, crafts,” he continued. “It’s not specifically an art festival; it’s a design festival.”
While a Design Week might be a relatively recent notion (or cross-marketing tool), design itself is an older concept that roughly coincides with the Industrial Revolution. Because things could be shaped, manufactured and produced in quantity, over time they can create a common assembly of objects, and hence an aesthetic of place.
Because the crafts of design produce all the elements of the house, from doormat to toaster, and shape the landscape around—it becomes a standard aesthetic for its consumers. An elegant solution to a mechanical problem, an arrangement of objects in space, or both. Vide, Mr. Coffee.
“I mean this in the broadest sense, but design can be a couple different things,” Zidonis said. “It’s either communicating something or it’s helping make our lives better. A tool that you can utilize, or an appliance. I mean, if you think about it, everything around you is designed, everything. Even nature has design elements.”
Many of the deeper conversations in the sensory arts of design can take place from Thursday to Sunday afternoon, at close to 30 different locations in Healdsburg. Some are as familiar as McIntyre Tile and the Portalupi Tasting Room, and some as obscure as the Neurobeauty Sensory Room on Matheson, which sounds (and looks like, and smells like, and feels like …) a good a way to awaken the five senses to fully appreciate design or wine tasting.
Apropos of that, Design Healdsburg offers two opportunities to tour Banshee Wines and Homes, a relatively new Alexander Valley estate from architects Amy Nielsen and Richard Schuh. Legendary chef Nancy Oakes and sausage-maker Bruce Aidells let visitors check out their Greene and Greene-styled Craftsman, built less than 20 years ago and wholly reflective of another era.
Intentional gardens are included, as at Enso Village, as well as other wineries and home tours, forest bathing and interactive book signings, and a DJ block party.
The lead-off event, titled “Every Space Tells a Story,” takes place Oct. 1 from 3-4:30pm in downtown Healdsburg at 134 Matheson. “And it’s about the integration of art into interior design,” Pearlman said, “leading right into the Art Night going on Thursday,” this month doubling as a Design Healdsburg event.
And waiting somewhere in the near future, Healdsburg Fashion Week will preview in November.
Some events are sold out, some have room for one or several more, designhealdsburg.com.
