A 720° sauce abbondanza
Home décor Valhalla, vibey vintage tees for the low, and more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Today we’ve got:
Some of the best ceramics — beautiful yet extremely functional — we’ve seen in a minute
A massive trove of vibey vintage tees for the low
An illustrious Spyfriend tells us about a book that sounds sick as h*ll??
More unbeatable recon
🔧🔧 Thanks to a rare Spyplane Glitch🔧🔧, some readers received a preliminary version of this sletter by mistake earlier this month. We apologize for the error, and also you’re welcome for getting a partial glimpse into the Future, a.k.a. now.
First up —
For years, we’ve been hearing legends about Salmon Creek Farm, a former hippie commune up in Mendocino County, and a few weekends back we finally visited. Big Homie Spyfriend Natalie So has some “back-channel connections” to Fritz Haeg — the kindvibed architect who bought the place in 2014 — and he kindly invited me & Erin to come take a tour the next time we were in the area…
We’re in the habit of celebrating Funky Handmade Vibe Enclaves and sharing them with Spy Nation. You know this if you read, e.g., our last Home Goods sletter, heavily inspired by a trip to woodworker Wharton Esherick’s incredible Pennsylvania home, where every single micron of the place radiates idiosyncratic charm & swag … it’s the kind of places teeming with what we like to call G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S.: Gangs Of Objects & Décor Giving Eclectic Refined Motley Spirit.
There are a couple viral TikTok clips of swaggy woodworkers at Salmon Creek engaged in subtly beautiful acts of Japanese-style joinery, so you know this place is G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S.-certified — and you know we accepted Fritz’s invitation with alacrity.
Salmon Creek Farm is a combined nonprofit artist’s retreat, occasional informal quasi-commune, and general “soul-restorative getaway.” It consists of 8 cabins arranged across 33 acres of coastal redwoods — the cabins were built by crunchy back-to-the-land-type amateurs back in the ‘70s, apparently using no power tools. One of the builders was 13 years old. There’s a very sick-looking out-of-print book about building your own that one of the co-founders wrote: Dwelling by River, one edition of which is pictured below. Copies pop up at resale now and again.
Thanks to that DIY pedigree, the cabins turned out extremely cool in extremely nonstandard designs. Part of what Fritz has done is update the structures in ways that honor the OG funkiness so faithfully that the line between old & new can be hard to spot. He also did new things like install an outdoor shower in the hollow of an enormous redwood stump.
It’s the kind of place that makes all the beat-up odds & ends decorating it look good, whether they’re objectively beautiful — sashiko-style mended quilts, chainsawed redwood stools — or pieces you wouldn’t give a second look in a less-vibey context. Natalie told us that virtually everything was either 1) copped by Fritz for the low from Mendocino thrift stores, 2) made on site, 3) or given as a gift.
Which brings us to the 2 excellent ceramic dishes pictured in the collage above — each one with an unmissable fluted edge — which we spotted stacked casually at Salmon Creek Farm’s outdoor kitchen. Even amid the 360° visual abbondanza, my gaze locked onto these. I was, like, “Ay they are so ill,” and Erin immediately identified them as the work of a gifted Bay Area ceramicist she’s admired for a minute. We’ve never shouted her out in the sletter until now, but she just put out some great new stuff earlier this month: