The Line between Everyday and Heirloom

“In the winter, everything is dead, and in the spring, everything comes to life,” says Catherine Bailey as she looks out the window of the Tahoe home she shares with her husband, Robin Petravic, and son, Jasper.

Bailey and Petravic are the driving forces behind a reinvigorated Heath Ceramics, the Sausalito, California-based company that was started in midcentury by Edith Heath and given a dose of new energy by the couple in 2004.

When taking the tour of the Heath facility, the guide explains that, at its essence, the company aims “to straddle that line between the everyday and heirloom,” words that perfectly describe the experience of Bailey and Petravic’s Tahoe home in California’s Sierra Nevada.

Finding the house (or being found by the house)

The couple are avid winter sports enthusiasts—Bailey had consulted for many years as a product designer for a large snowboard manufacturer—and had been looking for a weekend escape for some time when their real estate agent called about a listing in their desired area of Alpine Village. They were so excited about its location and the fact that they could walk to the slopes of Alpine Meadows Ski Resort that they made an offer on the house sight unseen.

When they did finally see the house, they were immediately taken by its placement on the lot, how it cascaded down the hill to the creek below and was framed by the dramatic mountain peaks behind it.

At the same time, they were underwhelmed by some unfortunate interior decorating choices. “Everything was green—green carpeting, green cabinets, and green linoleum,” a design aesthetic Bailey laughs about. “I guess the former owners thought, ‘We’re in the mountains, so we should make things the colors of trees.’ ”

The couple was able to look beyond the green, however, and fell in love with the bones of the house, especially its beamed wooden ceilings and reclaimed wood doors.

Making it modern

After purchasing the home in 2012, they embarked on what Bailey calls “a low-hanging-fruit” remodel. Her method was to “always look back to 1974, when the house was built, and not mask that, but make it feel nice for today. The brown of the wood beams and doors with bits of orange, yellow, and red resonate with the mood of that period,” she says. “The interior feels fresh and bright without having to paint everything white.”

It’s easy to draw a comparison between the house remodel and what Bailey has done with Heath as creative director. “We didn’t find it very interesting to just have a nostalgic company where you are just trying to recreate the past,” she says.

Instead, the past becomes inspiration for moving forward. “Our philosophy has been to look back to where you’ve been and what you’ve done and don’t ever run away from it, but to learn from it.”

“Our philosophy has been to look back to where you’ve been and what you’ve done and don’t ever run away from it, but to learn from it.”

Heath ceramics

Heath was founded in 1948 by Edith and Brian Heath and is famous for its handcrafted stoneware and distinctive glazes. Under Bailey and Petravic, it continues to produce and design midcentury tableware and tile in its California factories, but the couple have expanded the company with a business model driven by “design-led manufacturing principles, and in the belief that responsible business practices lead to long-term viability.” Since purchasing the company, they have added new colors, opened a new tile manufacturing factory and showroom in San Francisco, and started up a Los Angeles studio and showroom. Most importantly, they have expanded the brand through successful collaboration with designers and ceramic artists from around the world.

“We are always looking for the next creative opportunity that fits with what we love to do: the materials we love to explore and the people we want to work with,” Bailey explains. Those successful collaborations run the gamut from the prolific Fresno-based ceramic artist Stan Bitters and the well-known type designers at House Industries to the Mexican artist and designer Carla Fernández.

Tahoe sleepover

This spirit of openness is also reflected in the Tahoe house.

At 1,450 square feet (135 square meters), it’s a relatively small house with one big living area. But the couple was committed to finding a way to sleep a lot of people and their kids. Every bedroom has a loft with an additional place to sleep, so you can fit a family of three in each room. “We also turned the laundry room into a bedroom,” says Bailey. At times, there are three families staying at the house all at once. “That’s why we come here,” she says, “to spend time with people we want to spend time with. You don’t normally get to have your friends over to sleep at your house for the weekend.”

The couple also uses the house as a refuge and escape from the demands of running a hectic Bay Area business. The breathtaking living-room views of the Squaw Valley peaks provide the seclusion and isolation that they love. “You’re in a wonderful gem in the big outdoors—it’s kind of big out there—and there’s not a lot coming at you. That’s what makes it inspiring and special,” Bailey says.

Her seat of inspiration in the house is the couch. The expansive view opens up from there. “In the afternoon the light comes in across the fireplace, and it really gives you this great sense of time of day because there is no direct light until late afternoon.” At that moment “you think, ‘Is my day going like it should have?’ It’s your last chance to get out and take a walk and make the most of your day. It’s like an alarm clock, and it’s the sun, and I’m reminded that I want to get outside.”

“That’s why we come here, to spend time with people we want to spend time with. You don’t normally get to have your friends over to sleep at your house for the weekend.”

A place of inspiration

This sense of place—Tahoe, the outdoors, the sun, the mountains, the sky, the colors—serves as creative inspiration for Bailey. “When you are in that environment, there are all these base colors that ground you—make you feel the whole place, and then there are little points of vibrancy.” It’s an environment that is not bright colors all the time. “It’s subtle,” she says, “and the granite of the mountains is part of that, at least where we are. Granite grounds it colorwise. We are not on the lake, which is that crazy vibrant blue color.”

This play between vibrancy and calm, between old and new, between everyday and heirloom, is of particular interest to Bailey. “When I’m thinking of myself as a designer,” she says, “I think it’s important to create balance, and that can apply to everything. You’re trying to create a balance between a lot of different things—to make sure it’s making the right statement, the balance between doing something interesting and standing the test of time. Balancing utility with beauty—all those things you are trying to get right in the middle of, and if you do, then it does stand the test of time and meet its needs.” At the same time, “It is beautiful. To me, good design is taking all those things and striking the right balance.” △

The Fragrance of "Out There"

Hall Newbegin is out there. Upon first meeting him, I didn’t expect it. He seemed jovial, unintimidating, and mild-mannered. But in the first five minutes of our conversation he used the phrase “out there” eight times — “Part of what I wanted to do was to just be ‘out there’ . . . Being ‘out there’ just centered me . . . Being ‘out there’ saved me as person . . . I had no idea where this was going, but I loved being ‘out there.’ ”

Return to the wilderness

All of us go through periods of discovery in our lives when we are searching for direction, trying to find out what defines us and how it can drive our life and work. For Newbegin, the founder and head perfumer for Bay Area-based Juniper Ridge, that discovery came after a stint on the East Coast and a return to his roots in the West, a return to the wilderness — “out there” — where he feels most comfortable and alive.

Newbegin never imagined that being “out there” would lead to a burgeoning fragrance business, with his products sold in outlets around the globe. He stumbled upon the idea after trial and error — in his life, in his passions, and in his own business.

Capturing the essence of being “out there” is the driving force for the people who run Juniper Ridge, which proclaims itself the world’s only wilderness fragrance company. Headed by Newbegin and the firm’s chief storyteller and packaging designer, Obi Kaufmann, Juniper Ridge, per its website, is “built on the simple idea that nothing smells better than the forest.”

“Built on the simple idea that nothing smells better than the forest.”

Newbegin and his team embrace this mantra through a process called wild harvesting, where they make real fragrances from the places they know and love — the trails of the rugged and diverse American West.

Their teams of hikers crawl through mountain meadows, smelling the earth, the wild flowers in bloom, or the moss covering the trees, then harvest the ingredients to capture the real scent of that land. Armed with public permits or private permissions, they gather wild flowers, plants, bark, moss, mushrooms, and tree trimmings, then distill and extract fragrance by employing ancient perfume-making techniques of distillation, tincturing, infusion, and enfleurage. These formulations vary yearly and by harvest, due to rainfall, temperature, specific location, and season.

“I want people to stick their faces in the ground and just get really primitive.”

“I want people to stick their faces in the ground and just get really primitive,” says Newbegin, whose Instagram handle is @crawlonwetdirt. Yet this call to the primitive is based in fact: Our sense of smell is often called the oldest sense, the only one with a direct connection to the brain. That connection brings pleasure and sparks memory, transporting us in time and place. For the team at Juniper Ridge, the time and place is marked on every bottle of fragrance they sell. In fact, they authenticate the process of each harvest by stamping each package with a harvest number and by documenting the process through an accompanying story and photographs on the Juniper Ridge website.

“Our muse is the place. And our job is to funnel that the best we can,” says Newbegin, pointing to a small spray bottle of Sierra Granite, a fragrance connected to California’s Sierra Nevada. “Everything in this bottle is real. Our test is always ‘Is it the real place?’ ” Some of the other places they have captured include Big Sur (California coast), Siskiyou (Oregon coast), Mojave (Mojave Desert), and Cascade Glacier (Oregon’s Mount Hood).

“Our muse is the place."

Real fragrance resonates

Kaufman notes that as the business has grown, sales have been strongest in Scandinavia and New York City. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to the Sierra mountains or to Big Sur, it takes you to a place inside your own head that is common to all of us,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent of the people who buy this have never been to the Mojave Desert, but because it’s real fragrance, it resonates — this is real, it’s not Comme des Garçons, it’s not that bullshit stuff at the Nordstrom’s counter that’s made from petroleum, and that never existed on earth until ten seconds ago. Because this is real, it goes deep into our genetic past — we’re responding to something real.”

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to the Sierra mountains or to Big Sur, [the fragrance] takes you to a place inside your own head that is common to all of us.”

Saved by the wild

While hiking on Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais with the sometimes loquacious but unassuming Newbegin in his worn T-shirt and jeans, it’s hard to imagine that he would describe the transcendent moment of his life as a cliché. But those are the exact words he uses when he muses on the importance of the wilderness and the outdoors: “I feel like it saved my life.”

Growing up in Oregon, with Mount Hood in his backyard, Newbegin spent most of his youth hiking and backpacking. He attended college in New York but knew there was something growing inside of him, “a hunger to get back to the West and be in the mountains . . . I had camping and being outdoors in my blood. It’s a deep West Coast/western cultural thing,” he says.

With a last name like Newbegin, it seemed inevitable that he would eventually find his true calling. That happened in Berkeley, California, after a period he deems his “hippy schooling.” He took inspiration from eco-wilderness writers including Gary Snyder, John Muir, and David Brower and studied under commercial mushroom harvesters, members of native plant societies, and herbal medicine teachers.

New beginning

The real turning point came as he was foraging native medicinal plants in the Sierra Nevada. “I dug my trowel into osha root, and the air just exploded with that smell and it’s like, ‘ahhh.’ It would just slay me,” he says. “I didn’t know what the stuff was. I wasn’t thinking about fragrance or anything. I just loved being out there. It just centered me. It brought me into this world where the big thing is there, and it just brought peace over me. You’re looking at plants, at trees, your map, and you smell the ground and suddenly it breaks. You’re just there. All that chatting in your brain just stops, and you’re just there.”

This was the beginning of an epiphany, but the path from being an outdoorsman to becoming a true perfumer has been sixteen years in the making. “You know how journeys are,” Newbegin says, “You just start taking your steps, and soon you start getting somewhere. And so, I started learning how to extract goo out of plants. I was going to the Berkeley Public Library and trying to figure out the old extraction techniques of how you get the goo out of the plants.”

Eventually, he was mixing that goo with other ingredients to make soap and selling it for four bucks a bar at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market. He describes encounters with his first customers: “They would say, ‘Oh my God, this is Big Sur in a soap.’ ” Sounding a bit like Hemingway, he would give them the authentic story of the day that it was harvested — “I got black sage goo on my arms, and I took a nap under this big black sage shrub and had dreams about it and woke up, and the sun was on my face, and the air was just filled with the cleanness of black sage and bees in the air.” Their response, according to Newbegin: “OK, I’ll take ten of those, right now.”

Goo business

After quickly selling out of his product, Newbegin also realized that he was vastly underpricing his offerings. Over the years, he and his team have refined not only the process to get very consistent quality, they have also learned how to price their product to create a sustainable business. Newbegin laughs when he says, “We make perfume for people who hate perfume. It’s the worst business model ever.” And yet, it is a business that is working — with retailers such as Barneys New York now carrying the product, and outlets as far away as Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo.

“We make perfume for people who hate perfume. It’s the worst business model ever.”

And Newbegin’s enthusiasm for his product and the process is still very evident. “When I hand this to someone, I think to myself, ‘Oh, my God, you’re getting something just unbelievable.’ All that green in there . . . This is what Mount Hood was like as of September fourth of last year. All that green goo, tree pitch. It’s just real. It’s just 100 percent real.”

The Juniper Ridge team talks about how this realness is a stark contrast to the more synthetic nature of traditional perfumes. Those classic perfume houses employ someone who is called “a nose” to help them create unique fragrances. Globally, there are around fifty “noses” who are highly sought after for their olfactory abilities.

Although this is rarefied air that Newbegin wants no part of, he does refer to himself as “the Pied Piper of the nose.” He is quick to recall the power of the sense of smell. “My message is, use this primitive thing because it will change the person you are.” The scent of nature “is everywhere, all the time. So wake up your sense of smell,” he exhorts. “I want people to do it, not because they should, but because it’s the most sensually gratifying thing they can experience. It’s wonderful.”

Try for yourself

Newbegin’s final piece of advice: “Do what we do — get outdoors, crawl around on your hands and knees, smell the wet earth beneath your feet. Or if you’re worried about embarrassing yourself (which you should be since people don’t normally crawl around on trails), just start by crushing tree needles and plants under your nose. Stay with it, keep breathing it in. You may notice yourself feeling things, feeling something about the quietness of the place. That's the power of real fragrance.” △

"Stay with it, keep breathing it in. You may notice yourself feeling things, feeling something about the quietness of the place. That's the power of real fragrance.”