This spring, the chef Molly Levine began serving seasonal cuisine from a refurbished 1971 Airstream trailer parked on a former dairy farm in the Hudson Valley. Westerly Canteen’s trailer holds a compact kitchen with cream-painted walls and blond wood counters. “I had this wild idea, like, ‘What if we took the food truck concept and put it in a space that is still mobile but feels beautiful and welcoming?’” Levine said as she stirred a pot of golden-hued stock, fragrant with spring onion and green garlic. Levine, who previously worked at the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse, founded Westerly with her partner, Alex Kaindl, a farmer who tends half an acre in Sharon, Conn. Nearly all of their ingredients are sourced from farms nearby. (Starting this month, Kaindl’s crops will also be incorporated.) Developing the 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,” Kaindl said as Levine ladled the stock over a plate of nettle-stuffed ravioli. “We slice up the spring onions that go into the dish, and the tops are made into the broth,” Levine said. “We’re using every piece of the onion.” The founders hope to engage the surrounding community while also drawing diners from afar. They’ve partnered with Tenmile Distillery, which offers cocktails made with local ingredients to go alongside 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 Reclaims His Image
Over seven years after his release from Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he was wrongfully imprisoned for 41½ years, Gary Tyler will celebrate his first solo exhibition of quilts on July 8 at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, the same city where Rosa Parks and Tyler’s mother campaigned for his freedom in 1976. Tyler’s practice began after he started volunteering at Angola’s hospice program. In addition to gifting quilts to the families of late patients, volunteers would sell them at the prison’s rodeo for funding. When the group needed extra hands for an upcoming show, they recruited Tyler. “Doing my work made me realize that I have something to offer, that my greatest asset is myself,” Tyler says of revisiting quilting after his release. “I’m exhibiting to people what I’ve been through and who I am today.” The show’s title, “We Are the Willing,” is the motto of Angola’s drama club, which Tyler served as president of for 28 years. The 11 quilts on display feature symbols that relate to how Tyler sees his own evolution, like the butterfly, and self-portraits sourced from photos that were taken of Tyler while he was incarcerated. “It’s an opportunity for Gary to reproduce an image of himself at a particular moment in time, allowing him to develop agency over his story by reclaiming this mediated imagery,” the exhibition’s curator, Allison Glenn, says. Also on display is a vitrine of those sourced photographs alongside memorabilia that was circulated in the fight for Tyler’s freedom. “We Are the Willing” will be on view from July 8 through Sept. 6, lscgallery.com.
The fashion designer Ulla Johnson, known for her botanical prints and artisanal fabrics, is teaming up with the Italian lifestyle brand Cabana for her home décor debut. The capsule collection, launching July 12, includes an array of pieces that fans of her clothes might find familiar: the kaleidoscopic Hibiscus pattern that was on a dress in her pre-fall 2023 ready-to-wear collection now adorns poufs and hand-dyed napkins, while her plates are decorated with a bird print similar to those on the fabrics she uses every season. Johnson’s foray into interiors is a natural next step for the mother of three, who often hosts at her Montauk and Brooklyn homes. “I love to lay a beautiful table and arrange flowers and make everything very welcoming and convivial,” she says. The capsule offers options for everyday use and special occasions, with daisy-printed Murano glasses, antiques-inspired plates and place mats that have a delicate hand-embroidered trim. From $75, ullajohnson.com.
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A Minorcan Farm Hotel With a Swimming Cove Next Door
Near 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 the hotel group Vestige Collection and the Madrid-based firm EDM Arquitectura, which retained the building’s original structure made of sandstone, olive wood and lime-soaked clay. Most of the 34 rooms, spread between the main house and former barns and annexes, come with a private garden or terrace with views of the property’s nearly 450 acres, which include a working farm with citrus trees, olive groves and an organic vegetable and herb garden. Films are screened twice a week at 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 a night, vestigecollection.com.
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An Exhibition Celebrating Dorothy Liebes’s Distinct Weavings
In the middle decades of the 20th century, trained eyes were alert to something called the Liebes Look. Colorful, textured and shot through with shimmering, synthetic fibers like Lurex, the woven textiles of Dorothy Liebes were a signature feature of some of the most glamorous postwar interiors in America: 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 inside of the 1957 Chrysler Plymouth Fury, to name just a few. Opening July 7 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, an exhibition called “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes,” celebrates her work and role as a tastemaker. Celebrity weaver may seem like the fulfillment of an impossible Instagram dream but, in her lifetime, Liebes was exactly that. She was a high-profile consultant to DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department, collaborated with the likes of the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and was declared “the greatest weaver alive today” in the pages of House Beautiful. A publicity photograph of Liebes in her studio shows her overseeing a team of artisans working at their looms against a backdrop of an enviable yarn wall. Her biography has all the elements of a 20th-century design legend, but she isn’t a household name yet. This exhibition, and its handsome accompanying monograph, now available from Yale University Press and the Cooper Hewitt, will surely change that. “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” will be 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 destructive to 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 the wood once considered trash. Now, he’s taken albizia to the water in the shape of surfboards, a throwback to the original wooden boards once made in Hawaii but built for modern performance. In May, he opened the Bizia Surf shop in Wahiawa, a town in central Oahu, offering longboard and fish models made entirely out of albizia. Each board showcases the light wood grain, some speckled like vanilla bean ice cream and striking enough to hang on the wall. But they are made for riding. Not much heavier than an average fish or log and surprisingly lively on a wave, the boards are made of hollowed-out wood planks to keep them light while still preserving strength. In the water, you might hear the surfboards creak like a floor because of the dynamic nature of wood, “almost like it’s breathing — it’s a living material,” Valenti says. From $1,465, biziasurf.com.
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