Brooke Giannetti - Patina Living

Patina Living

Brooke Giannetti & Steve Giannetti

Photography by Victoria Pearson

Patina Living

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2019 Brooke Giannetti

Illustrations 2019 Steve Giannetti

Photos 2019 Victoria Pearson, or as noted

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Gibbs Smith

P.O. Box 667

Layton, Utah 84041

Orders: 1.800.835.4993

www.gibbs-smith.com

ISBN: 978-1-4236-5093-5

It was ten in the morning on December 5, 2017. Steve and I were doing our last-minute check around Patina Farm, the family home we designed in Ojai, California. On this morning, Patina Farm was a smoky ghost town surrounded by deep orange flames. A vicious California wildfire was forcing us to evacuate. As we watched the towering flames engulf the mountains around our home, Steve, our daughter, Leila, and I packed up our cars with our dogs, rabbit, sheep and goats and all of their necessities. Our gardener, Ricardo, and his team somehow convinced our four miniature donkeys to get into our neighbors trailer to be driven to a safe location. We set our chickens free, leaving food and water and praying for their safety until we could return.

Photograph 2019 Steve Giannetti

After walking through each room of the house, attempting to take a mental inventory of cherished, memory-filled possessions, we headed out to the gardens. As we hurried through the now-mature grounds of Patina Farm, we were reminded of the time we had installed the new plantings that would become our outdoor rooms. Now, five years later, the gardens looked lush and lovely, softened by the pale pink haze of the fire; but they were also quiet and lifeless. Our donkeys, Buttercup, Daisy, Blossom and Huckleberry, were not grazing the lower fields or sleeping under the pepper trees as they normally did. The protected garden and animal barn next to my officewhere our miniature pygmy goats, sisters Thelma and Louise and their best friend, Dot, and our sheep, Linen, Paisley and Cashmere, normally lounged and playedwere silent and deserted.

As we headed out to our packed cars, Steve asked me if there was anything else that I wanted to take with us. I looked around at the housea house we had spent years thoughtfully designingand realized that all I really needed to take, the soul of our house, was already securely resting in our cars.

While driving away, we talked about our first dreams of Patina Farm. Steve recalled his ideas of an Italian garden complete with a terraced fruit orchard, a formal rose garden, and outdoor rooms surrounded by boxwood. I remembered imagining myself standing at our future kitchen sink as I watched donkeys chasing each other across the field. I clearly envisioned farm animals visiting me in the garden next to my office. I saw myself gathering fresh eggs from our coop, giving mealworms to the chickens as a thank-you for our breakfast. At the time, Steve had looked at me like he thought I had gone mad. What are we going to do with all of those animals? he asked.

Five years later, on this terrible morning during the fires, we both understood the answer to that question in a deeper way than we could ever have imagined before, and the answer had more to do with what the animals were doing for us and the meaning they had brought to our lives.

As weve shared our journey to Patina Farmon my blog, Velvet and Linen, in our book Patina Farm and on Instagrammany of our readers have shared their desire to move toward an organic, nature-centered life. Some of you just want to add more gardens to your property or figure out how to have a few chickens in your side yard, while others dream of creating your version of Patina Farm, with farm animals and a potager to grow your own food.

We are writing this book for all of you, to share why we decided to embrace this lifestyle and what we have learned along the way. We will also introduce you to some of the wonderful people in our life who have helped us navigate the winding road of farm life. One of the important nuggets of wisdom we have learned is that there is not just one way to live. The idea of this book is to explain what works (and hasnt worked) for us and why. By sharing our journey, we hope to demystify the homestead farm lifestyle. If we city folk can do it, so can you!

Photograph 2019 Steve Giannetti

If you had met Steve and me fifteen years ago, you never would have imagined us living on a farm. We both grew up in the city. We raised our children in the city of Santa Monica, where we lived on a small 50 by 150-foot lot. Our life was hectic, filled with family activities and the demands of our design work. We were happy, but we craved some calm to balance the fast pace of our life.

As we described in our previous books, I found a reprieve from our life commitments in the potager garden that we built in the front of our Santa Monica home. I discovered the zen of gardening, finding the time I spent weeding, planting, amending, and watering to be meditative. The dirt underneath my nails began to look more beautiful than any manicure. This connection to the earth energized my body and soul, and the ability to grow food for our family to eat fed my innate desire to nurture the ones I loved. The voices in my head became quieter and the frenetic pace of life slowed down.

For many people living in the city, this is where the story would end. But the serenity I experienced in our garden was a game changer for me and soon led to my adding chickens to our urban life. Caring for our new ladies and eating the eggs they gifted us pushed us farther down the path toward rural living, and Steve and I began to think about other ways we could re-center our lives to include more time gardening and caring for animals.

Combining dreams with reality is a challenge, but its at the heart of what we do for our architecture and design clients. We decided to apply this process to our own life. Steve and I started to brainstorm what our dream life might look like. Our thoughts led to the creation of Patina Farm in Ojai, a small artistic and rural community about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles.