Home Away from Home: VPA&D in San Francisco!

I’m sitting on a pier that juts out into the San Francisco Bay. From one side of the pier I have an unadulterated view of Alcatraz, and from the other side, the Golden Gate Bridge signals the end of the continent I have just driven halfway across to get here.

When I wrote last month’s entry, it was deleted from the web program before I could even upload it. I never found time to rewrite it—but it was an ode to fall in New Mexico. September and October are the best months of the year in the Southwest. The cottonwoods and aspen turn a glorious shade of gold, the days are warm and the sky cerulean. Nights are cool and crisp, presaging the onset of winter. This afternoon, I spent a wonderful 15 minutes chatting with Western Interiors’ publisher, Jennifer Matthews, about autumn in New Mexico. She grew up in the Land of Enchantment, but now lives in Connecticut. She misses fall in New Mexico so much that she often burns pinon incense in her fireplace, just to feel like she’s at home. One of the things she loves the most is the mercurial autumn weather—days when it can go from sunny and warm to rain to hail to evening snow showers in the span of twelve hours!!

But all that seems far away now, sitting on the dock of the Bay at the Western Interiors Design & Home Show in San Francisco. We loaded up our trailer on Monday and drove across the desert, through the Santa Ana winds, past the clouds of smoke billowing over the mountains of Southern California, and up to this pier, where we recreated a mini VPA&D in San Francisco. The response has been gratifying. My favorite remarks have come from young people, who find our look fun, eclectic, and refreshing. We brought along the work of many of our artists and designers, as well as new furniture and home furnishings from the Victoria Price Collection.

Everyone keeps asking if the things that they are seeing are up on our website. As anyone who is reading this can see, we have fallen behind with uploading pictures and descriptions to our website. There are just not enough hours in the day!!! So, if anyone knows of a young person in Santa Fe who would be interested in uploading pictures and images to our website, please contact the gallery. We’re desperate for help!!!

And, pretty soon, we hope to have some of our new products online—from our punc*t pillows to the Cygnus line to the Berkeley table!

In the meantime, I am enjoying being on the water, even if my only foray is to step outside and let the wind blow on my face from the end of the pier. San Francisco is a wonderful city, and the food is amazing, but I love Santa Fe and our high desert mountains. I am looking forward to winter—the smell of pinon fires, skiing in the Sangres, In the meantime, I feel right at home in our little gallery on a pier in the San Francisco Bay, proving that home is where you make it!