Kitchenware and Tableware Market

If you’re a regular at Descanso Gardens, it’s likely you’ve noticed there’s a lot less lawn at the entrance lately. Instead, there’s eastern redbud, sycamore, native shrubs and other species.

That change is expected to save 600,000 gallons of water from the more than 3 million gallons used for irrigation each year at the La Canada Flintridge gardens, said the gardens' executive director David Brown.

And, that step is just one of many that Descanso expects to take to make the gardens a “water-wise, fire-smart oasis of beauty.”

Several years of work went into a plan to guide the gardens into the future and to make them a model for the rest of us. Read more about Descano's plans. Or, take a look at how the gardens look today, and take a look at the possible future gardens.

Like many public gardens around the country, Descanso aims to be environmentally responsible. That could mean many changes in what’s planted where, how gardens are irrigated and what happens to wastes.

One change could bring a tear to some fans’ eyes, even if they support it. Many of the camellias will be relocated because the water they require year-round turns out to be harmful to the live oaks nearby. The trees thrive in Southern California's dry climate.

– Mary MacVean

Photo: Descanso Gardens. Credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Related: Our Dry Garden columnist Emily Green described the changes coming to Descanso Gardens as "beyondrefreshing, more like happy dance exciting." 

When we checked in with them last month, the owners of the Italian furniture showroom Eccola on La Brea Avenue had just opened a second showroom on Beverly Boulevard, pictured above. At the time, Kathleen White and Maurizio Almanza said they planned to keep both stores open. “It may sound crazy to have two stores that are five minutes apart,” White said, “but we're discovering that a completely different kind of client is finding us on Beverly.”

Earlier this week, however, the e-mail landed: The old store, at 326 N. La Brea Ave., is closing after all. A moving sale with select pieces at 30% to 50% off is running through July 24.

It's part of a retail frenzy in L.A. right now: openings, closings and sales galore (see below). We'll track the scene here, and in the meantime, you can preview the new Eccola in pictures.

– Craig Nakano

Photo credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

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Our sustainable-gardening columnist, Emily Green, is on assignment this week, working on a larger story for L.A. at Home that will appear later this summer. Green has been writing about gardens for The Times ever since she helped to launch the Home section back in 2003, so we thought we'd provide easy links to earlier columns you may have missed:

Hills may turn brown, but wild sunflowers still burst with summer color

Loosen up! For a softer, bird-friendly approach, why not grow hedges without edges?

Planting artemisia, understated in its elegance

Beauty, grace and stamina in summer: the olive tree

Green's ode to the oaks of California

– Craig Nakano

Photo credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

More than 30 interior designers and other vendors will sell their inventory and offer consultations at the Designer Tag Sale scheduled for Saturday in Brentwood.

Sasha Emerson, Alie Waldman, Bridgid Coulter, Suzan Fellman, Krislyn Design and Vanessa De Vargas are among those who will be selling furniture, lamps, rugs, pillows and other accessories. Nothing will cost more than $200, organizers say.

"It's like a high-end yard sale," said De Vargas, who organized the event with Vanessa Kogevinas, Little Castle Productions and Fyndes. "We'll have everything from vintage to modern. It may be new. It may be gently used."

The sale will be 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in two adjoining backyards. Admission is $10 and includes appetizers and mini consultations with designers. The first 30 in line will get a goodie bag.

201 Beloit Ave., Brentwood; cash only.

– Lisa Boone

Left photo: One of the designs that made Krislyn a go-to resource for botanical art in L.A. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

Right photo: A dining room decorated by Sasha Emerson and featured in the Home section. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Driving by the thicket of design stores advertising sales on Beverly Boulevard recently, I spied a strange window sign that read "Inheritance." Did my estate-sale-hungry eyes deceive me? Sort of.

Inheritance is the new name for what had been Zelen Home, a design destination for folks who like to decorate with distinction and set their tables with a quirky style. Owner Dan Zelen, who has moved to San Francisco, continues to purchase wonderfully peculiar items for the store, which is now owned by Mike Andrews. He is carrying on Zelen's tradition with fabulous finds including the Anatomica china series, above, from the New English.

Designed by Lisa Turner, the bone china collection is made in Staffordshire, England, a center for more traditional dinnerware. It features a photo rendering of a 19th century gent with medical-book illustrations. The coffee setup shown here is cleverly designed with the head inside the cup and a coordinating saucer. Cost: $80. The Anatomica line also includes bowls, dishes and plates that are sure to be conversation-starters when used for starters.

Inheritance stocks a range of tabletop items — baskets, linens, napkins, cutlery, glasses and ceramics — as well as wool pillows and the lighting designs of the San Francisco company Shine Labs.

Andrews also has designed his own pieces for the store including handsome steel-based coffee tables with reclaimed wood tops ($900) and the hand-wrought sterling silver martini pitchforks with tumbled gem stones ($180 for a set of four), right, produced in collaboration with the Los Angeles silversmith studio Allan Adler.

8055 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-6756

– David A. Keeps

Photo credits from top: The New English, Inheritance

JOIN US: Follow headlines on the Southern California style scene.

For more than 20 years, Michael Aram has brought the natural world to the table in the form of sand-cast and hand-forged metal accessories. His workshop in India, which employs 170 craftsmen, also has created the Skeleton chair, a solid aluminum seat that resembles a human spine, and the Enchanted Forest line of tree-inspired tables and lamps. But Aram, pictured above, is best known for serving and cocktail pieces that incorporate the forms of coral, leaves, flowers, fruit and vegetables.

None is more striking — or downright amusing — than his recently launched Golden Corn collection. The inspiration, Aram says, was "this very tacky plastic corn set I bought on EBay. It was very cheap; I probably spent more on the shipping. And then I thought, how can I make this beautiful?"

The answer: an enameled serving platter ($99), and a matching set set of four dishes ($99), plus gold-plated salt and pepper shakers ($79), and a set of eight cob picks ($79), below, sold at Bloomingdale's and the Michael Aram website.

On a swing through Southern California, Aram answered questions about design and summer entertaining, including the obvious one:

Why a gold-plated corn cob?

You have to shake people up a little bit. I like to make even the smallest things look iconic, or in this case, i-corn-ic. I  design products that speak of a moment, like let's barbecue and have a picnic — moments that create a sense of nostalgia. And because so many of my designs are given as gifts, I loved the idea of someone going to a friend's house for the weekend and bringing the corn set.

Remind me to invite you to my next barbecue. What could I do to earn your respect as a host?

Whether it's the table decorations, the food or the music, a good host thinks of things specifically for guests. When people feel that they've been considered, it's a lovely thing, so even though it's a little formal, I like place cards. And I love individual salt and pepper shakers and a small vase of flowers for each person.

What makes a table memorable?

Creativity. Thinking outside the box and mixing elements and things that have meaning for you. I love to see beautiful new things and family heirlooms. I never mind things that are scratched or chopped or dented, things that speak of use and history.

What's a buzz kill?

I hate to say it, but paper napkins. I can't handle that. I'm sorry. That's awful, but no, no, no. Even at home, my partner makes fun of me for always putting out linen napkins.

Will high-end Danish home store DK Vogue be the latest retail casualty to hit West Hollywood? Store managers are cagey about whether the Beverly Boulevard shop is actually closing (even though “For Lease” signs are up), but price tags on the inventory definitely look like a clearance sale.

Tableware is 50% off, including funky-cool connecting vases by Louise Campbell (now $98) and Monica Ritterband’s glass tea-light holders ($18 for a pair). Clean-lined sofas are all heavily discounted, going for about $3,000 to $5,500, but the real deals are the store’s stackable dining chairs.

A variety of styles by big-name designers from Denmark are as much as 70% off. In my most recent visit, Arne Jacobsen’s timeless Series 7 chairs, originally $600 and up, are now $249 to $399, depending on color and finish. Tom Stepp’s Funk walnut wood chairs are $249 each, down from $850. And Vico Magistretti's lacquered ash Vico Duo dining chairs (originally $860, now $249) come in bright green, pale blue and other fresh colors.

Some of the store’s most iconic items also are on sale, but don’t expect pricing miracles. Four of Verner Panton’s famous Cone chairs in royal blue, red and black are on the floor for $1,299, down from $2,695. And Poul Kjaerholm’s iconic PK 22 lounge chairs are $1,500 to $2,565, down from $2,565 to $5,133.

9020 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 385-8645. Open Monday through Saturday.

– Alexandria Abramian Mott

Photos, clockwise from top left: Jacobsen's Series 7 chairs, Panton's Cone chair, Kjaerholm's PK22 chairs, Campbell's vases and Ritterband's tea-light holders. Credits: DK Vogue.

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Architect Davida Rochlin only started to think about the new American porch after devoting much of her life to pondering the old American porch. She spent her childhood in a Craftsman house that had "all kinds of porches," she said. As a graduate student in architecture at UC Berkeley, Rochlin traveled across the country studying verandas, balconies, stoops, back porches, front porches, sleeping porches, screened porches, wrap-around porches, you-name-it porches — all for her master's thesis. If you saw a study on American porches, whether in Charles Moore’s 1983 "Home Sweet Home: American Domestic Vernacular Architecture"  or in a Fine Homebuilding book, the chances are good that it was by Rochlin.

Fittingly for high summer, Rochlin has returned to the subject with the just-opened exhibit "The New American Porch" in a pop-up gallery in the Barry Building, a Brentwood Midcentury landmark.

One wall is devoted to Rochlin’s drawings of historical porches. Another wall features porches that she has designed in a modern vernacular.

Sentimentalists should be warned: They are different.

"The porch will never be what it was in the past," she said. "We have such new needs."

However, as Rochlin sees it, change may save the porch, and a changed porch may help to save us as we adapt to climate change. "Depending on where you orient a porch, it can be a profound insulator in winter and source of shade in summer," she said.

The social function of the porch is changing too, she argued. For most Americans, the days of idle afternoons in the rocking chair died with the advent of air conditioning.

That said, she also thinks that the transitional role of the porch is undiminished. Anyone who has ever been drawn to pass through a free-standing Japanese torii gate instead of walking around it is tacitly aware of the kinetics of what Rochlin calls "portology." To her, a barkeeper who she met in Madison, Ga., while studying Civil War-era porches summed up the emotional import when he told her, "Land is God-given, a house is man-made and the porch is what ties the man-made to the God-given."

The New American Porch" exhibit will run at the pop-up L.A. Archive Gallery through Aug. 28. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday at 11973 San Vicente Blvd., No. 101, Los Angeles.

— Emily Green

Photo: Illustration from Davida Rochlin. Credit: Robert Landau

When an air photographer snapped his shutter in a fly-over of Fred and Florence Bixby’s Long Beach ranch in 1936, time seemed to have stood still. Groomed fields surrounded their home, nestled in a shady grove of pepper trees around a patio designed by local plantsman Paul Howard. What the photographer framed out of his pastoral vista was nearby Signal Hill. Car travel was pushing oil exploration, and the lessee of Signal Hill, Shell Oil, struck black gold in 1921 at derrick Alamitos No. 1. Thousands of gallons a day from that well and the dozens that followed on Signal Hill and at nearby Seal Beach transformed a Spanish rancho into a supplier to global petroleum markets. Read about what was gained and what was forever lost in our Lost L.A. column on Rancho Los Alamitos. 

– Sam Watters

Photo credit: Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation

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Central to the promise of the California dream is the idea that you can reach out your kitchen window and pluck a lemon. As we hit the natural limits to our water supply, that specter of home-grown fruit remains steadily possible, even a social ideal in the complex matrix of energy and water footprints.

In attaining it, the first hurdle is choice: What kind of lemon? What about oranges and limes? A modest lot in Los Angeles can produce full loads of not only citrus but also avocados, plums, apricots and nectarines. And don’t forget figs, pomegranates and apples. A long list only becomes longer when you consider the varieties and crosses available for each type of fruit. Valencia orange or blood? Eureka lemon or Meyer? Plum or aprium?

Choice of fruit trees is one of the most important decisions that you’ll make in a garden. You’ll be eating the results for years to come. So rather than wish that you had planted a Fuerte or Guatemalan avocado instead of a Hass, consider spending the weekend of Aug. 14 at the Festival of Fruit sponsored by the Los Angeles Chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers and Cal Poly Pomona Agriculture Department.

The organizers are the best kind of experts — euphoric enthusiasts — so don’t be shy. The worst thing that could happen to you is being showered with tips. If you have an old avocado tree but don’t know the type, pluck a fruit and take it to show Julie Frink, volunteer at the UC South Coast Research and Extension Center and chief compiler of an excellent UC extension guide to varieties. She will be talking on avocados at 10 a.m. Stay in your chair for the next session if you’re looking for a spineless cactus for a school garden.

Beyond many sessions touching on topics that include fruit tree care, grapes, honeybees, canning, dragon fruit and jujubes, there will be tours. Four days of field trips begin on Thursday at the UC field station in Irvine. Other institutions hosting festival tours include the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino; the Fullerton Arboretum; and Cal Poly Pomona’s John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies. Among private gardens on show are a Simi Valley home with pomegranates, sapotes, guavas and quince, and a Brea property with cherimoya and citrus.

A special theme of this festival is dragon fruit, also known as pitahaya. For those of you who haven’t encountered this succulent, or tasted its flaming pink-skinned fruit, there will be nowhere to hide. An Aug. 13 tour of Cal Poly Pomona’s Pitahaya Plantation  will be followed Aug. 14 with a dragon fruit lecture and, no doubt, dragon plant sales.

But one needn’t be in pursuit of rarity or weirdness to benefit from this festival. The enthusiasts behind it lay the table for visitors to browse. On the menu: everything you ever wanted to know about fruit in this our land of fruit and nuts.

– Emily Green

Green's column on sustainable gardening appears here every Friday.

Photos, from top: Eureka lemon. Credit: Los Angeles Times. Staked dragon fruit plant. Credit: Emily Green. Dragon fruit. Credit: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

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