This spring, chef Molly Levine began serving seasonal cuisine from a renovated 1971 Airstream trailer parked on a former dairy farm in the Hudson Valley. The Westerly Canteen trailer has a compact kitchen with cream-painted walls and blond wood counters. “I had this wild idea, like, ‘What if we take the food truck concept and put it in a space that’s still mobile but beautiful and welcoming?'” Levine says as he stirs a pot of stock golden in color, fragrant with spring onion and green garlic. Levine, who previously worked at the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse, founded Westerly with his partner, Alex Kaindl, a farmer who raises half an acre in Sharon, Conn. Almost all of their ingredients come from nearby farms. (Starting this month, Kaindl crops will also be included.) Building a weekly menu is a puzzle that requires maximizing limited space and resources. “A lot of our decisions are very creative and passion driven but also very practical,” says Kaindl as Levine ladles stock onto a plate of nettle-stuffed ravioli. “We slice the spring onions that go into the dish, and the tops are made into the broth,” says Levine. “We use every piece of onion.” The founders hope to engage with the surrounding community while also drawing in diners from further afield. They’ve partnered with Tenmile Distillery, which offers cocktails made with local ingredients to go along with Westerly’s menu (their take on a Negroni includes Faccia Brutto bitters from Brooklyn, Method sweet vermouth from Romulus and gin made on-site at Tenmile). “We really want people to sit here and stay a while,” Levine said. westerlycanteen.com.
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A Quilter Takes Back His Picture
More than seven years after his release from Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he was wrongly imprisoned for 41½ years, Gary Tyler will celebrate his first solo exhibition of quilts on July 8 at Library Street Collective in Detroit, the same city where Rosa Parks and Tyler’s mother campaigned for his freedom in 1976. Tyler’s training began after he began volunteering with Angola’s hospice program. In addition to providing quilts to families of late patients, volunteers will sell them at prison rodeo for funding. When the group needed extra hands for an upcoming show, they hired Tyler. “Doing my job made me realize that I have something to offer, that my greatest asset is myself,” Tyler said of revisiting quilting after his release. “I show people what I’ve been through and who I am now.” The show’s title, “We Are the Willing,” is the motto of the drama club of Angola, where Tyler served as president for 28 years. The 11 quilts on display feature symbols related to how Tyler sees his own evolution, such as the butterfly, and self-portraits derived from photographs taken of Tyler while he was incarcerated. “This is an opportunity for Gary to reproduce an image of himself at a particular moment in time, allowing him to develop agency in his story by reclaiming this mediated imagery,” said exhibit curator Allison Glenn. A vitrine of captured photos is also on display along with memorabilia that was deployed in Tyler’s fight for freedom. “We Are the Willing” will air from July 8 to September 6, lscgallery.com.
Fashion designer Ulla Johnson, known for her botanical prints and artisanal fabrics, has teamed up with Italian lifestyle brand Cabana for her home décor debut. The capsule collection, which launches on July 12, includes a range of pieces that fans of her clothes may be familiar with: the kaleidoscopic Hibiscus pattern featured on a dress in her pre-fall 2023 ready-to-wear collection which is now decorated with poufs and hand-dyed. napkins, while her plates are decorated with a bird print similar to the fabrics she uses in each season. Johnson’s foray into interiors was a natural next step for the mother of three, who often hosts at her Montauk and Brooklyn homes. “I love setting a beautiful table and arranging flowers and making everything very welcoming and convivial,” she said. The capsule offers options for everyday use and special occasions, with daisy-printed Murano glasses, antique plates and place mats with delicate hand-embroidered trim. From $75, ullajohnson.com.
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A Minorcan Farm Hotel With a Swimming Cove Adjacent
Close to the Camí de Cavalls coastal walking trail and within easy reach of the palm-lined swimming cove of Cala Son Vell is an 18th-century Venetian-style manor house, the latest boutique property to open on the Spanish island of Minorca. Also called Son Vell, it was renovated by hotel group Vestige Collection and Madrid-based firm EDM Arquitectura, which preserved the building’s original structure of sandstone, olive wood and lime-soaked clay. Most of the 34 rooms, located between the main house and former barns and annexes, have a private garden or terrace with views of the property’s nearly 450 acres, which includes a working farm with citrus trees, olive grove, and organic vegetables and herbs. garden Movies are shown twice a week in an outdoor cinema area near a pétanque pitch, while yoga can be done on a platform overlooking the limestone mountains. At Vermell and Sa Clara, the property’s restaurants, Minorcan cuisine is the focus with locally produced olive oil, cheese and wine among the highlights. From $845 per night, vestigecollection.com.
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An Exhibition Celebrating the Unique Textiles of Dorothy Liebes
In the middle decades of the 20th century, trained eyes were alert to something called the Liebes Look. Colorful, textured and shot through with glitter and synthetic fibers such as Lurex, Dorothy Liebes’ woven fabrics were a prominent feature of some of America’s most glamorous postwar interiors. : Doris Duke’s Shangri La, the Delegates Dining Room at the United Nations, the cabin of the American Airlines flagship 747, the set of the 1949 Barbara Stanwyck film noir “Eastside, Westside” and the interior of a 1957 Chrysler Plymouth Fury, to name just a few . Opening July 7 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, an exhibition called “One Dark, One Light, One Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes,” celebrating his work and role as a tastemaker. Celebrity weaver may seem like an impossible dream come true on Instagram but, in her life, Liebes is exactly that. He was a high-profile consultant to DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department, collaborated with the likes of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and architect Frank Lloyd Wright and was declared “the greatest weaver alive today” among House Beautiful page. A publicity photo of Liebes in his studio shows him supervising a group of artisans working on their looms against a backdrop of an enviable wall of yarn. His biography contains all the elements of a 20th-century design legend, but he is not yet a household name. This exhibition, and its handsome companion monographnow available from Yale University Press and Cooper Hewitt, is sure to change that. “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” is on view through Feb. 4, 2024, cooperhewitt.org.
When Joey Valenti was an architecture graduate student on Oahu, he set out to prove that the invasive albizia tree, imported to Hawaii from Indonesia and destroying native ecosystems, could also make beautiful and functional structures. . He made his case: clients, including the Patagonia store in Honolulu and the 1 Hotel in Princeville, on Kauai, commissioned his designs using wood that was once considered waste. Now, he’s brought albizia to the water in the shape of surfboards, a throwback to the original wooden board once made in Hawaii but made for modern performance. In May, he opened the Bizia Surf shop in Wahiawa, a town in central Oahu, offering longboards and fish models made entirely of albizia. Each board shows a light wood grain, some speckled like vanilla bean ice cream and striking enough to stick to the wall. But they are made for riding. Not much heavier than a standard fish or log and surprisingly buoyant in the waves, the boards are made of perforated wood planks to keep them light while still maintaining strength. In the water, you can hear the surfboards creak like a floor because of the dynamic nature of the wood, “almost like it’s breathing — it’s a living material,” Valenti says. From $1,465, biziasurf.com.
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