Proof of life—and design everywhere

Proof of life—and design everywhere

New year, chaotic design energy: folk art, modernist hair pins, color charts, SCI-Arc

Kelsey Keith

Feb 19, 2026

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More feelings about buildings

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles for the

Center for Craft

’s annual board retreat. In between studio visits—including one to

Sarah Rosalena

’s loft space in the garment district, with a peek at her LC2 digital jacquard loom that’s

“bringing fiber art into the future”

—I squeezed in a girlfriends’ dinner at

JAR

, a visit to the

Studio Ford

showroom, and a once-in-a-lifetime tour of architect

Ray Kappe

’s house in Rustic Canyon, which recently

went on the market.

(Sorry, already in escrow with a backup offer.)

Here is the photo I sneaked before my phone got locked in a cubby on our mind-blowing tour of the Kappe House. The lower glass-encased room used to be Kappe’s office, and that rosewood Eames lounge chair dates to when the house was first built (1965).

As someone who’s been on the record for having

feelings about buildings

, I will admit that being inside this house utterly overwhelmed me, in the most sublime way. A bit about the spatial organization: The site—a steep, rocky bank surrounding a small stream—dictated the structure, a series of seven platforms slotted between six concrete towers, all linked with two-foot-thick glue-laminated Douglas fir beams. Glass clerestories abound; minimally framed glass walls are mitered on corners before dead-ending back into brush-hammered concrete. To quote the

Los Angeles Times HOME

magazine from 1968:

It defies the rules of what an interior should look like. It seems immense. It is pierced everywhere to let the light come in and the eye look out. It changes levels in startling ways. And yet it is so beautifully logical when you know the ‘why’ of it all.

Obnoxious as it may sound, no photograph does this house justice, and no plan or section fully explains the experience of being in, or peeping through, the house. Kappe himself said it

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best: “There is something about the way I work that seems to decompose the volume in a way that the photograph never truly tells the story of the feeling of the experience.”

Some photographs by Julius Shulman because I simply can’t help myself.

L: Exterior showing the carport, which leads directly into the interior stairwell and up to Kappe’s architecture studio, photographed by Julius Shulman in 1968. R: My snapshot of the same, February 2026. Note the Jaguar MK2 in both!

Guest dispatch

Friend of the newsletter

Charles de Lisle

—a designer who knows from collectible objects of beauty!—is the first person who clued me in about

NAMELESS Art + Design Show

, an antiques fair devoted to unsigned folk art, craft, and design. I dispatched my trusted pal

Emily Fishman

—a multitalented fashion designer, knitwear expert, and

illustrator/artist

—to go in my stead and report back. Here’s Emily with the scene.

“I do everything Kelsey tells me to when it comes to design, so when this came up, I instantly bought tickets. NAMELESS is a curated fair of vendors featuring

“work by anonymous outsider and folk artists and functional objects including furniture, lighting, and textiles by undiscovered vernacular designers.”

Vernacular designer

is

another way of saying a self-taught creator. Untrained makers working outside of galleries or academia, using their own intuition and the skills and materials traditional to their surroundings.

I am a kind of a self-taught artist, too. A fashion designer by trade, I have spent the past year on a self-prescribed sabbatical exploring art and drawing and making things mostly for myself by following my intuition. So on many levels, the show

hit

.

I came away with an important lesson: Make things you care about, and other people will care too. And “nameless” as these artists may be,

their signature, their stamp of humanity, is in the craft of the pieces.

It is the evidence of their hand that reinforces the gift of being alive, the joy of making art, and the warmth of community.

Not unrelated: I fell in love with so many things at the fair that my next weekend activity needs to be attending open houses upstate so I have room for my future 19th-century stool collection. A few things worth highlighting, below:

Middle: The artist is present and should have bought this mirror.

Frames = art

We live in an era where you end up ordering everything online to maximize efficiency. This is not that. Patina on the wood, statement mattes, and designs reflecting the art inside reminded me to consider the container.

Consider the game board

There were so many beautiful hand-painted boards for games I knew and games I wish I knew. I wouldn’t even think about my phone if I had patterns like these to stare at during a heated match.

Specificity rules

Crocheted candle sticks, carving within the exact wood grain of a tiny door, Judy Garland-collaged postcards, carving a pond on a rock... I have no idea

why

these were made, but I love them for their idiosyncrasies.

Ye stamp of tramp

In the mid 19th-early, men started chip carving v-shaped notches and other shapes with pocket knives into cigar boxes, making frames, mirrors, boxes, and furniture. This practice grew during the Depression as a way for idle hands to keep productive, and was dubbed “tramp art” in

this 1959 article

in the magazine

Pennsylvania Folklife

. A bit of a misnomer: the artists weren’t actually train-hopping itinerants; they were immigrant shopkeepers, farmers, and factory workers bringing traditions from their respective homelands to America.

Elevate the doodle

As a compulsive doodler myself, seeing these quotidian scribbles up on a wall or in a beautiful frame gave me a feeling of tenderness for the artist.

I had to stop the patchwork sweater woman and inquire. It is

vintage J.Crew

and it’s sold out on the internet.

Folk art dealers have the best knits.

The going aesthetic for the dealer cohort is as follows: chunky knit, utilitarian pant, chunky boot or sneaker, jaunty beanie. Cozy, functional, matches the furniture.

Now the big reveal...here is what I

did

buy for my one-bedroom railroad apartment in Brooklyn:

A doorstop, a cross-written letter in which they wrote in both directions to save paper (!), and a fish matchstick holder. Plus, a few dealers I didn’t purchase from but I’ll certainly be checking in with again:

@battle_brown,

@candlerarts,

@oldasadam,

@portmanteau.nyc

Thank you, Emily! Read her weekly on Substack

right here

.

Full credit due to the

“godly 18th-century rave”

that is

The Testament of Ann Lee

—the story of the founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee—for re-awakening a long dormant bodily calling in me toward modern dance, and its presentation. (

This clip

featuring the film’s choreographer,

Celia Rowlson-Hall

, is only 47 seconds long and explains what I mean.) After we saw the movie,

Erin

noted the opening sequence’s echoes of

Martha Graham

’s

Appalachian Spring

, and, sure enough, Rowlson-Hall

cites the 1944 dance

, which in turn features set design by

Isamu Noguchi

cosplaying… Shaker. And down the rabbit hole we go!

Appalachian Spring by Martha Graham, photographed in 1944, with sets by Isamu Noguchi. The woman at left is seated on his

rocking chair design

.

The Isamu Noguchi Archive has a wealth of material relating to Graham and Noguchi’s decades-long artistic

collaboration

, including

filmed dance excerpts

(watch for a clip of

Appalachian Spring

), correspondence, performance photography, and—maybe my favorite thing—

still-lifes

of stage elements that Noguchi designed for her ballets.

L: Martha Graham herself on

Jocasta’s bed

, which Noguchi designed for the 1947 Oedipal ballet

Night Journey

. He even designed her

hair ornament

(right).

It all came together when the Martha Graham Company came to Berkeley this past weekend for

a centennial performance

at Cal. We got to see

Night Journey

, one of the aforementioned Graham-Noguchi stage collabs. And though it wasn’t noted in the program, I think the one stage element in

Chronicle

, c. 1936 and the best/last piece if you ask me,

was also designed by Noguchi

?

I should mention:

massive Noguchi retrospective

opening at the

High Museum

in Atlanta in April, and traveling thereafter.

There’s a catalog

. There will be

playscapes

.

And there will be dance.

A few last things:

I mentioned visiting

Studio Ford

’s showroom (above), a highly memorable aerie in a Deco building in Koreatown which

Josie Ford

has decked out in her

geometric block prints

with a restrained color palette. (She used to work at

Commune

, so you know it’s good.) She’s now doing a

line of lighting and stools

under the moniker Bruinooge Ford—with her boyfriend, also a designer. Studio Ford’s newest seasonal collection, which launches March 27, is inspired by “costume patterns and set illustrations of the early 20th century avant-garde theater,” namely drawings by

Alastair

and

Leon Bakst

. Big fan!

L: Nils-Udo,

Volcanic brook bed, foxglove blossoms. Ile de La Réunion,

1990. R:

Rosehip petals and white pine needles, North Sea,

1986.

Every January I manage to whiff the sign-ups for

Walter De Maria

’s

Lightning Field

and

Michael Heizer

’s

City

. Some day I won’t. Until then, I’ll be looking at these images documenting work by

Nils-Udo

, a German environmental artist well-regarded in France but not so much here. For more land art, I wrote about the book

Groundswell: Women of Land Art

here

.

Via

A Tiny Apt

,

designer

Merie Subryan

recs

this

1982 chrome-framed Kromvik bed

from Ikea—a design I’ve never seen but am now dying to cop.

A color chart assigning hues to emotional states, designed in 1901! Tag yourself. [

Available open-source

from the Gutenberg Project, h/t

Kelsey Rose Barthés

]

That’s all for now—thank you, as always, for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please ❤️, share, or comment—it all helps!

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For more Kappe bon mots,

this 2011 interview

he did with Sam Lubell for

Architect’s Newspaper

is great. And for the real ‘heads, UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research has an 11-hour oral history with Kappe in its archives—

all available online

. If you only listen to one tape, make it Tape IV!

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