Over the years, the couple collected works by local artists who shaped San Francisco art and history, filling the home with rare copper, pottery, Heath and whimsical pieces.

After the passing of his husband, Richard is ready to let their collection go as part of his healing process.

I walked the house with Fine Estate Inc founders Martin Codina and Valetta Ciarla as they moved room to room, corner to corner, assessing each piece.

Martin would pick up a vase, turn it over once, and just know everything about it: the maker, the year, the story behind it.

Decades in the estate and auction world will do that but still a rare sight to see at an age where anyone can point Google Lens at an object and get an answer, or ask AI what an item is. There was something almost startling about watching knowledge in action from experience of having actually held thousands of pieces like this one before.

This collection will be sold in the Auction house & Fine Estate Showroom - open to the public, but before that happens, come walk this home with me before it completely changes.

(Left to right: Valletta, Richard, & Martin at Richard’s home)

The House that Moved Due to San Francisco’s Expansion

The home holds a story of San Francisco change and expansion. It was designed by Henry Gutterson, the architect behind what is today the Christian Science retirement home at the end of West Portal.

This house wasn’t built for this particular lot.

Gutterson designed it in 1956 for Helen Day Ritchie, a woman connected to a real estate and legal family downtown who wanted a weekend escape at a period when St. Francis Wood was still mostly trees and open grassland.

As people moved into the Sunset in greater numbers, the road up to the neighborhood needed to expand from a single lane in each direction to two. The house happened to be sitting exactly where the new lanes needed to go.

So the whole structure, house and garage together, was physically relocated to the lot where it stands now and it’s been there ever since.

This house survived being in the way of San Francisco’s own expansion and today it is lived in by Richard.

Falling in love with San Francisco Disco in the 70s, and a Life of Collecting

Richard came to San Francisco in 1973, just after finishing his service. Before that, stationed at Fort Ord, he’d take every opportunity to get to the city, drawn in by the disco and gay scene and how alive it was.

His husband, Skip, had already moved to San Francisco in the 1960s.

Richard lived downtown in the mid-70s, near Polk Gulch, during the era of the neighborhood’s most vivid identity: the “clones,” the culture around Buzzby’s (Be), a stretch of the city he remembers as central to gay life in San Francisco before the Castro took on that role.

He recalled the transgender community’s own fight for space in the cafés of that era, when police tried to remove patrons and were met with resistance, a piece of San Francisco history that predates most people’s timeline of the city’s civil rights story.

That’s the backdrop the collection grew out of: two men building a life in San Francisco during one of its most transformative decades, and over years, assembling one of the more remarkable private San Francisco copper and pottery collections Fine Estate’s team encountered.

Martin, walking through the house, put it plainly: he looked around, looked at Richard, and asked, half-joking, if he knew what he actually had.

(Richard in the kitchen of his home)

The Collection

Martin shares that when he walked into the home his first reaction was: “Are you out of your mind? Where did all this come from?”

What makes these pieces unique is the fact that they are iconically San Francisco and represent the history of the city.

For example: Bufano’s sculptures are everywhere in the city - there are at least 20 of them. Richard has at least 5 of them in his home.

The collection includes copper by Dirk Van Erp, among other local names - a detail that grounds the sale firmly in San Francisco’s own art history, not just American craft more broadly.

Dirk Van Erp & The Copper

Almost every copper piece in the house traces back to Dirk van Erp, the San Francisco metalworker whose story starts, unexpectedly, with war surplus.

After World War I, scrapyards were full of discarded artillery shells, casings by the tens of thousands, and van Erp began hammering them by hand into lamps and vessels. A resourceful and specifically San Francisco origin for what became a signature American Arts and Crafts style.

His work carries several different maker’s marks over the course of his career - sometimes his name alone, sometimes paired with a box mark, sometimes referencing an early partnership.

One lamp in the collection stood out to Martin as one of the rarer examples he’s seen: small, unassuming, and exactly the kind of piece you can spend years looking for and never find.

Richard and Martin also traced a connection to a woman who worked alongside van Erp early in his career, D’Arcy Gaw, his early collaborator at the Copper Shop before he went out on his own.

Beniamino Bufano

Scattered through the house are several sculptures by Beniamino Bufano, who Martin describes as iconically San Francisco.

Bufano’s public sculptures are installed across the city, Martin estimated at least twenty of them, and Richard and Skip had collected several works beyond what was even on display, keeping some in storage.

In the room, four figures with distinctive rounded forms turned out to be Bufano pieces, along with a grass-green sculpture and a small pink cat figure that Martin identified almost as an aside, “who knows what else is a Bufano in here.”

Van Briggle Pottery

Among the copper are pieces of Van Briggle pottery, tied to a story that runs east before it runs west.

Van Briggle was a potter working on the East Coast whose respiratory health forced him to move to Colorado Springs. He and his wife set up a pottery studio.

He died shortly after arriving to Colorado but his wife kept the operation running.

Van Briggle Pottery is still producing work in Colorado Springs today, decades after most of its Arts and Crafts-era contemporaries closed for good.

Newcomb College - a piece of the American art pottery movement

Also folded into the collection is a Newcomb College piece, part of the broader American Art Pottery movement that flourished roughly between 1890 and 1920.

Newcomb, based in New Orleans, is one of the defining names of that period.

Fine Estate’s Upcoming Sale

Martin and Valetta who have seen hundreds of homes in the Bay Area mark this one as one as having one of the most incredible collections they have seen. They are excited to bring the pieces to the Fine Estate Showroom & Auction House.

About every two weeks the Fine Estate Showroom host a three day sale for the public to shop treasures from homes across the Bay Area. Their auction house hosts an in-person, on the phone and online auction with rare items once a month. Follow their Instagram page to get updates on their upcoming sales!

Eventually many of the items in this home will be featured in these sales - follow along to get updates and details.

(Martin Codina, assessing every item)

DISCLAIMER:
The photos in this article feature vintage taxidermy that is part of a private residential collection assembled over several decades. These pieces are shared here strictly for documentary and historical purposes, as part of a broader story about the home, its owner, and the estate collection being cataloged by Fine Estate. Their inclusion here is not an endorsement of hunting, wildlife collection, or the taxidermy trade, past or present. Any items in this collection that are subject to state, federal, or international wildlife protection laws, including but not limited to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, California Fish and Game Code protections for specially protected species such as mountain lions, and CITES, will be reviewed for compliance and handled accordingly by Fine Estate prior to any sale or transfer. This content is intended for general audiences and is not a solicitation to buy, sell, or trade wildlife specimens.

Will this be the new Marina summer tradition? I certainly think (and hope) so…

This Saturday, The Guardsmen is doing something they’ve never done before.

For the first time ever, three blocks of the Marina’s busiest street are closing down to cars and turning into a full-blown street party, with almost 50 local restaurants, bars, shops, and makers standing shoulder to shoulder.

There’s a stage going up with live music. A raffle with prizes worth thousands. Food and drinks. Activation stations for the kids.

And underneath all of it, one goal:

Raising money for the Bay Area kids who need it most.

Here’s What’s Coming this Saturday and why you CANNOT miss it!

On Stage

Here’s the lineup:

Kicking things off from 1:00 to 2:30 PM is the neighborhood’s own Resident Dog, setting the tone for the afternoon.

From 2:45 to 4:15 PM, BLK DMND takes over.

And closing out the day from 4:30 to 6:00 PM is The Good Bad, San Francisco’s own high-energy newgrass and bluegrass outfit — bringing the party home.

Little Original Joe’s is the Stage Sponsor behind it all!

District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, whose district includes the Marina, has been closely involved in helping get this event off the ground, and word is he may even make an appearance on stage.

On the Block: Food, Drinks, & More!

Every drink you buy from The Guardsmen bar go 100% to support Bay Area kids!

Drinks are flowing from the:

• Guardsmen Bar, Balboa Cafe, Bar Darling, Lobalita, Yer Drink, Bartlett Estates, Campus, And more!

On the food side:

• Little Original Joe’s, Norcina, Sushi Obsession, Dragon Wel, Me So Hungry Too, Respectable Bird, Westside Kitchen, Sunday Rose, Chestnut Street Granola, Goldi’s Spice, Coba Coffee, nd more…

Fitness and wellness brands are also on the block, including:

• Crunch Fitness, Barry’s, Sports Basement, X3 Bar, Vital Ice, Jetset Pilates, and Presidio Golf Club.

For shopping and pets:

• Timbuk2, Pet Adoption, Costco, Signature Innovation Group, Suet Co., Demby Co., Farm Fresh to You, Pet Food Express, Jeffrey’s Natural Pet Foods, Iriz Watches, Face Foundry, Bay Street Goods, and Pocket Square Clothing.

There’s also a McLaren super car on display, and games and community booths from Volo, a chalk and cornhole games booth, Doug & Friends, plus local nonprofits the Boys & Girls Club, the YMCA, St. Vincent de Paul, and LOVB.

The whole thing is backed by:

• Stage Sponsor: Little Original Joe’s

• VIP Sponsors: Eria and Cultivar

• Presenting Sponsors: John Cardente, Stephen Sherrill, The Thorsesen Foundation

• More sponsors: Drakes Brewing Co, Fathers, Delta Dental, Holbrook House, Backstage Nappa Valley Winery, Snazzy Dazzling Cocktails, Balboa Cafe, Souvla, The Olympic Club Foundation, Best Day Brewing, Jack Wall.

Go VIP and Give Back

If you want your ticket to do the most, go VIP.

Every VIP ticket sold goes straight to The Guardsmen’s camperships and scholarships and changes a kid’s life.

The VIP experience takes place inside Eria’s new pr

ivate event space on Chestnut, right next to the stage - a dedicated space to enjoy the afternoon, food from Cultivar, and two drink tickets included with admission.

One of the best spots on the street, while directly supporting the kids the event exists for.

The Raffle

There are going to be 1,500 tickets raffled, all prizes 100% donated ranging from $25 to $1800 in value.

Just a few prizes in the mix include:

A week at YMCA camp, a Christmas tree with delivery, VIP tickets to the tree lot party, Presidio tickets, a dental implant, a free cleaning, a dentist gift basket, a $200 pair of shoes from On, and a Timbuk2 messenger bag, and more!

Anyone who donates $50 or more at the Guardsmen booth also walks away with a keepsake from what could be the start of a new Bay Area tradition.

For the Kids Who Need It Most

Underneath the music and the beer garden is the part that actually brings a neighborhood together.

The Guardsmen has spent decades funding Camperships and scholarships for at-risk Bay Area youth - kids who need the experience and support these camps can give them most.

This block party is how they raise the money to keep doing it. 100% of everything poured at the Guardsmen Bar goes straight back into their programs, and every dollar raised moves them closer to their $25,000 goal for the day.

Join the Fun!

Bring your appetite, bring your people, and see you on Chestnut.

Permits to close down a street don’t come easy - the time, cost, and coordination it takes are significant, and this is the first time The Guardsmen have ever attempted something at this scale. There’s no guarantee on a first-year event like this.

Which is exactly why showing up matters!

Let’s make this a great one so we that The Guardsmen can continue this event next year and continue to make a difference in Bay Area kids’ lives!

I’ve seen a lot of luxury bag collections - from private owners, multi-home sales, auctions, estate sales, and more.

But I have yet to see a collection quite like the one at the upcoming Arkollab pop-up coming to San Francisco this weekend.

Arkollab is opening the doors to what might be one of the most remarkable secondhand luxury sales San Francisco has seen, with Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, Bottega Veneta, all of it authenticated.

The question I couldn’t stop asking myself:

How does a company land inventory like this, and still manage to make it accessible?

That’s the part of the story worth telling. So here’s why, and how they pulled it off.

A Different Model in the Luxury Resale World

Here’s the part that makes Arkollab interesting to someone like me:

I’ve spent years at the estate sales watching how items move quickly through the homes to the hands of buyers allowing very short holding times, quick purchases, and competitive market prices.

Consignment has long been the backbone of luxury resale, and there’s a reason it’s stuck around:

It lets a seller and a shop share in the upside once a piece finds its buyer.

Arkollab just takes a different road.

Founded by Eyen Duque and Emily Elkins, the company buys inventory outright - using their own capital. That means if you’re selling, you get paid on the spot rather than waiting for the item to sell through.

Every piece gets authenticated through a financially-backed third-party service before it ever touches a sales floor, whether that floor is a pop-up table, their e-commerce site, live shopping, or wholesale.

The tradeoff - and they’re upfront about it:

They’re not chasing max profit on every single item.

Their model runs on turnover - a roughly 90-day window to move a piece, even at cost, even at a loss if it comes to that.

A fast, healthy cash cycle means they can keep buying.

They’ve even got a name for the deals that don’t pencil out great on paper - they call them a “relationship buy” or “relationship sell.”

The logic isn’t this transaction. It’s the next ten.

From Houston to Russian Hill in Three Weeks

What got my attention as someone who covers Bay Area sales was the combination of merchandise quality matched with entrepreneurial personalities, attractive prices, and a genuinely nimble business model.

Arkollab built its foundation in Houston and has since expanded into Texas, New York, and an export office in Tokyo.

But San Francisco was still close to a blank slate a few weeks back with no local infrastructure, no inventory, and just a handful of early viewings.

Until it just happened.

Sellers started reaching out to the founders directly, asking to sell their luxury bags.

And that’s the founder mentality:

If there’s a city with an opportunity in it, get on a plane, meet the seller face to face, buy the piece with the company’s own money, and figure out the right sales channel afterward.

It’s the same playbook they run everywhere, and it’s exactly what they did in San Francisco.

The founders will tell you speed is baked into how they built the company from day one. Both Eyen and Emily come from backgrounds in the secondhand industry, particularly secondhand textiles, a world that runs on tight margins and fast-moving capital, where hesitation costs you the deal.

That instinct is exactly what they leaned on here.

In a matter of days, sellers surfaced, significant purchases got negotiated, inventory was authenticated and paid for, and a Russian Hill space was secured and staged, all in the time it takes most businesses to schedule a single planning meeting.

But speed isn’t the whole story.

What struck me just as much was the tone they’re trying to set on the floor.

Arkollab wants to feel like the opposite of the traditional resale experience:

No pressure to sell, no intimidation walking in the door. You can bring a piece in, hear an offer, make a counteroffer, sit with it, and come back later if you’re not ready.

Their bet is simple:

Be fair enough, consistently enough, that people choose to come back.

What’s at the Sale

Expect authenticated pre-owned handbags, watches, jewelry, and accessories from Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, Bottega Veneta, and more.

Meet the founders - because they will be there ;).

If you’d like to sell any items - bring them with you. The space will be divided into a sellers’ and buyers’ sections. You’ll receive same-day payment on certain categories, and appointments can be booked ahead for a guaranteed slot.

There’s a quiet that settles over a house when someone has truly lived in it. That’s the feeling that hits you the second you walk through the door of this 1908 Berkeley home, just blocks from UC Berkeley, designed by Bernard Maybeck himself.

Light pours in from every angle, with views to San Francisco. Pottery, art, and books collected from continents away fill the rooms, alongside a grand piano and musical instruments scattered throughout.

You can tell this is a really happy home.

And the woman who lived here made it so, because you can tell she lived life to the fullest. She is a psychologist, a nurse, a single mother, and a mountaineer who led women into terrain they’d long been told wasn’t theirs to climb.

Now, as she moves to New York, she’s about to sell nearly all of it.

Her name is Carole, and she’s about to open up her life’s collection to the world for the public to shop it for the first time.

A Life Lived at Altitude

Carole’s resume alone reads like fiction. Registered nurse. Clinical psychologist with a private Berkeley practice that ran for three decades. Expert skier. Mountaineer. Single mother who raised her daughter, while somehow finding time to circle the globe with her, more than once.

Born in Virginia, Carole spent two formative years in Taiwan as a young woman, where she grew close with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the former First Lady of the Republic of China. This friendship shaped her early worldview before she ever picked up a pair of skis.

She eventually made her way to the Bay Area to pursue her degree in psychology, and never really left.

But it’s the mountains that seem to have shaped her most. Carole skied competitively, and in 1986 led the American Women’s Expedition to Mount Kongur in China. This was part of a wave of women pushing into high-altitude mountaineering at a time when the field had, for decades, been treated as men’s territory.

She hiked to Everest Base Camp.

She spent years as a psychology consultant for Women’s Ski Programs in Aspen and British Columbia, working directly with female athletes on the mental side of high-performance sport.

And she later turned her own experience into published research, coauthoring a study on how women’s bodies and minds respond to extreme altitude, “Neurobehavioral and Psychosocial Functioning of Women Exposed to High Altitude in Mountaineering,” alongside researchers Brenda D. Townes, Robert J. Brooks, and Joel H. Kramer, in Perceptual and Motor Skills.

It’s a rare thing to lead the expedition and study its effects on the women who lived it alongside you.

The Day Everything Changed

Carole’s story could have ended very differently.

While ski racing with her daughter, she caught an edge, went down hard, and slid into a tree well. This was a catastrophic, near-fatal injury that could have taken her out entirely.

Instead, it became the basis of her book, The Day I Died: Brain Trauma and the Journey Back.

Drawing on her own dual expertise as a psychologist and a registered nurse, she turned her recovery into something instructive: a meditation on rehabilitation medicine, brain plasticity, and somatic therapy, written for anyone who has ever had to rebuild themselves after the ground gave out.

The House: A Maybeck, Through and Through

The home itself deserves its own chapter.

It was built in 1908, designed by Bernard Ralph Maybeck who is also the architect responsible for some of the Bay Area’s most enduring landmarks, including San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.

Maybeck built primarily around the Bay Area, and Berkeley in particular was his adopted home; he lived and taught architecture at UC Berkeley, and many of his most personal, characterful residential designs are scattered through the hills just blocks from where Carole’s home sits today.

Maybeck homes were never trying to impress you from the curb.

They were built to be lived in, and this home is warm, textural, full of natural materials and unexpected light.

Windows placed to chase the sun through the day. It’s easy to see, walking through Carole’s home, why she chose it: it’s a house built for someone who notices light, who values craft, who wanted a home that felt like a living thing.

Walking Through

Stepping inside feels like walking through the map of someone’s entire life. Every room holds another chapter.

There’s pottery from corners of the world, like every section represents a different place she loved on the map. There’s a unit dedicated to her hiking and skiing excursions with tents, sleeping bags, vintage skiing suits and more. An entire library’s worth of books, midcentury furniture, music instruments, whimsical kitchenware, and so much more.

Views of Berkeley slip in and out of the windows. The light moves through the house all day.

It’s hard to walk through and not feel like you’re intruding on something sacred - a life fully lived, now laid out room by room for its final chapter here.

The Estate Sale

Carole is relocating to New York, and with that move comes the sale of a home’s worth of history. More information will be shared soon, as well as the address of the sale a day before it happens on my Instagram page (@ByDanzi) but here are the initial details to mark your calendars:

More details are coming soon. Follow @bydanzi on Instagram and join the newsletter for full address and pricing updates.

He’s one of the most recognizable cannabis entrepreneurs in the country, and he built the whole thing from here, from the Bay Area, rapping about the come-up while he was still living it in real time.

This weekend, Fine Estate is putting a huge chunk of his personal collection up for sale and it’s happening inside Fine Estate’s own San Rafael showroom, because Berner and his family are in the middle of moving into their forever home, and rather than quietly packing up a storage unit, they decided to let the public in to shop the collection first.

It says a lot about him, but it also says a lot about the community Fine Estate has built. This isn't some anonymous liquidation sale; it's a room full of people who show up because they trust what's been curated, who understand the story behind each piece, and who treat a sale like this as something closer to a cultural moment than a transaction.

The Bay Area Rapper Turned Global Entrepreneur

Before Cookies was a cannabis brand you could find in nearly every state with legal weed, Berner was a San Francisco kid rapping about the streets he grew up on.

He came up in the Bay’s independent hip-hop scene in the 2000s, grinding through mixtapes and features the same way a lot of Bay Area artists have historically had to, building an audience from the ground up, with no shortcut and no major label handing him a platform.

What set him apart is that he never separated the music from the business.

Cookies started as a strain he helped popularize, and by the time California legalized recreational cannabis, he’d already turned it into one of the most trusted names in the industry - before “cannabis entrepreneur” was even a widely used title. He built out retail, cultivation, and apparel, and did it all while staying staying vocal about where he came from.

The Bay has produced plenty of people who made it big and then made themselves scarce. Berner didn’t do that. He’s stayed a fixture - showing up at Bay Area events, repping the region in interviews, keeping Cookies flagship stores rooted here even as the brand went national and then international.

He’s one of the clearest modern examples of a Bay Area hustle turning into a legitimate, lasting business, and that’s exactly why a sale like this feels like more than just a shopping event.

It’s a look inside the personal life of someone who’s become a genuine piece of the region’s current cultural identity.

What’s actually in the sale:

Fashion — Shop the wardrobe of someone who’s spent two decades building a brand identity in public. Jerseys, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Luis Vuitton, sneakers, and more.

Jewelry — gold and silver pieces from different eras.

Midcentury furniture — including names like: Franco Albini, Florence Knoll, Kofod-Larsen, Cassina (LC4), Knoll, Design Institute of America, Mid Century Broyhill

Heath Ceramics — If you are from here, you know Heath is Sausalito history - a pottery house that’s been quietly defining what “Bay Area design” even means since the 1940s.

Why I’m covering this one

Estate sales are an honest window into how people live. Most of the sales I cover are Bay Area based and have a cultural significance and history.

This one’s different because everybody already knows the name walking in.

Berner turned a strain of weed and a scrappy Bay Area hustle into one of the biggest cannabis brands on the planet, and he did it without ever pretending to be from anywhere else.

Watching that story hit a new chapter, a genuine “moving to the forever home” moment, and having Fine Estate be the ones trusted to open that collection up to the public is exactly the kind of local story I started this newsletter to chase down.

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A Saddle Making Company Turns into a Bed Manufacturer

In 1852, 22-year-old craftsman Pehr Adolf Janson receives a Master Saddler certificate by King Oscar I of Sweden.

In Sweden at the time, the King personally decided whether you were a master. And Pehr Adolf Janson was.

He got to work. Saddles, harnesses, cushions for horse-drawn carriages — all of it stuffed with the most prized material of the era: horsetail hair. Long, coarse, naturally springy, breathable in a way nothing synthetic has ever come close to. He became known for making things that lasted.

And then the automobile arrived.

Practically overnight, the world stopped needing saddles.

Most craftsmen would have closed up shop, taken the loss, moved on. The Janson family did something else entirely.

They decided to make beds instead.

It turns out the same things that make a great saddle make a great mattress.

Breathability. Natural materials. Support that works with the body instead of against it. They applied 170 years of mastery to a new problem.

By 1952 — exactly one century after that moment with the King — Hästens was named the official bedding supplier to the Swedish Royal Court.

It is still family-owned. Still making every single bed by hand in the same town in Sweden where it all started.

Welcome to the world of Hästens.

So What’s Actually In This Bed?

Most mattresses are made of foam, springs, and synthetic materials.

You replace them every eight to ten years, drag the old one to the curb, and move on.

A Hästens is built completely differently.

Every single bed — from their entry-level model all the way up to the Grand Vividus — is made entirely from natural materials. Cotton. Wool. Flax. Slow-growing Swedish pine. Swedish steel springs. And at the heart of it all: horsetail hair.

Very specific Horsetail hair.

The long strands from the tail specifically, which have a natural curl and spring that no synthetic has ever replicated. The hair is sourced from South America, then washed, braided wet so it curls tighter, and hand-teased strand by strand across the surface of the mattress.

Craftspeople spend months, sometimes a full year, just mastering that one technique.

The result is a sleep surface that behaves like nothing else. The horsehair creates millions of tiny natural springs beneath you. The wool regulates your temperature. Warm when you’re cold, cool when you’re warm. The flax reduces static electricity. There’s no memory foam. No gel layer. No synthetic anything.

Each bed is built as a three-piece sleep system: a top mattress, a middle mattress, and a base, all engineered to work together. They come with a 25-year warranty and a rebedding service where the mattress can be completely disassembled and rebuilt. Not replaced.

The oldest Hästens bed still in use today is over 100 years old.

And that iconic blue check pattern you’ve definitely seen somewhere without knowing what it was was introduced in 1978 by Jack Ryde, a fourth-generation family member who just wanted the bed to be recognizable.

It’s now one of the most recognizable patterns in luxury goods in the world.

Why Does It Cost $1 Million?

Let’s break it down.

The materials aren’t cheap.

The Grand Vividus contains more horsetail hair than any other bed Hästens makes, basically double the amount of their second-most expensive model. The wool comes from the belly of New Zealand sheep. The leather is nubuck. The handles are covered in stingray skin.

The labor is extraordinary.

Nine master artisans. Forty-five days. Up to 600 hours of skilled handwork, stitching that takes a year just to learn, spring coils hand-sewn in one at a time, layers placed with a precision no machine can replicate.

Only the most experienced craftspeople in the entire Köping factory are trusted to touch a Grand Vividus. Much of the process is a closely guarded secret.

The designer is Ferris Rafauli. One of the most sought-after luxury designers in the world. He designed the Grand Vividus from scratch.

From the mohair headboard to the gold brass hardware to the debossed check pattern on the nubuck leather base. He’s the same designer behind Drake’s $100 million Toronto mansion.

And then there’s scarcity. Only a small number of Grand Vividus beds are made each year. There is a waitlist. When Drake bought his in 2020, it cost just under $400,000.

Today the same bed starts at $868,990 and reaches $1 million for the largest custom sizes. The price has more than doubled in five years, not because the materials cost more, the craftspeople are rarer, and demand keeps growing.

The Bed Drake Spent Nearly $400K On

In 2020, Drake became the very first person to buy a Grand Vividus. He showed it off in an Architectural Digest tour of his 50,000-square-foot Toronto mansion, and the internet lost its mind.

His quote about the bed: “The bedroom is where I come to decompress from the world at the end of the night and where I open my eyes to seize the day. The bed lets you float.”

Drake’s version weighs nearly half a ton. It features a hand-stitched tufted leather headboard with antique mirror details, gold hardware throughout as a direct nod to Hästens’ saddle-making origins, and built into the reverse side of the headboard: a whiskey-and-champagne bar.

Since then, Beyoncé has one. Brad Pitt. Tom Cruise. Angelina Jolie. DJ Khaled posted an Instagram reel of four men carrying his up the stairs. Wayne Gretzky loved his so much he became the face of the brand’s newest campaign. And at the Hästens factory in Köping, there’s a wall of famous names they’re not allowed to share, A-list actors, musicians, action stars, and at least one former governor.

What It Was Like to Walk Into That Room

I’ve been to a lot of showrooms. Estate sales in sprawling Marin estates, antique fairs where a single chair costs more than a month’s rent. I thought I had a good sense of what luxury felt like.

Walking into the Hästens showroom for a private viewing was something else entirely.

They invited me to actually lie down. To stay. To move through the collection and feel the difference between one bed and the next.

The entry-level beds, which start around $30k and are still extraordinary and feel nothing like what you’re used to. Then you move up. The 2000T. The Vividus. And finally, the Grand Vividus.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how much I liked it.

There’s a quality of support I have genuinely never felt anywhere else, not in a five-star hotel, not in a single mattress I’ve ever tested or written about. It’s exactly what Drake described. A floating sensation, but one where you feel completely held. Supported without pressure. Cradled without sinking.

I laid there longer than I should have. I didn’t want to get up.

And when I finally did, I went home and looked at my own bed and felt genuinely apologetic.

Is It Worth It?

Here’s my honest answer: it depends entirely on what you value.

There’s no clinical evidence that a $1 million mattress produces measurably better sleep than a well-made $5,000 one. But I also think that’s the wrong question.

What you’re investing in when you buy a Hästens is craft at its absolute highest. Materials sourced with genuine intention. Techniques passed down through six generations of one family in one town in Sweden. A bed that will outlast almost everything else in your home and can be rebuilt rather than replaced, that exists in a category of making things well, slowly, by hand, with total commitment, that has become genuinely rare in the world.

It’s the Hermès Birkin of beds, people say. And like a Birkin, the people who understand it don’t need to be convinced.

For the right person, at the right moment, it isn’t a frivolous purchase. It’s the most considered one you’ll ever make.

How to Experience It for Yourself

If this has your curiosity I’d love to connect you and arrange a private showing for you as well. Reach out directly to my Instagram handle or email at admin@thismomentmarketing.com and I will make sure you get scheduled.

Sweet dreams, Dani @bydanzi

Auction online and in person: June 21st, Sunday, 11AM, 121 Jordan st, San Rafael

Browse Full Catelogue

Pair of Diamond, 18k, Angel, Earrings

Each designed as an angel holding one round brilliant-cut diamond, her wings accented by five single-cut diamonds, set in an 18k yellow gold earring mounting measuring approximately 1.00 x 0.50 inches. Total diamond carat weight for the pair approximately 0.50 cttw | Gross weight: 10.9 grams.

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Pair of Sapphire, 14k Whimsical 'Fish' Earrings

Each designed as a fish, the eye one round-cut sapphire measuring approximately 3.0 mm, set in a 14k yellow gold, post-style earring mounting measuring approximately 1.15 x 0.70 inches | Gross weight: 9.1 grams.

14k Yellow Gold Bracelet

The 14k yellow gold textured links measuring approximately 1.07 inches in weight, completed by a hidden push-button tongue-and-groove clasp with figure-eight safety, forming a 7 1/2 inch bracelet.
Gross weight: 99.8 grams.

Swedish Modernist Citrine, 18k Ring, Atelje Stigbert

Featuring one round citrine measuring approximately 8.0 mm, set in a ribbed, openwork gallery adorned with applied silver-tone spheres, set in an 18k yellow gold ring mounting, size 6. With Swedish marks, artist's signature.
Gross weight: 5.6 grams.

Art Deco Onyx, 9k Yellow Gold Snake Ring

Centering an oval onyx plaque set in a 9k yellow gold ring mounting designed as a coiled snake, size 9 1/4.
Gross weight: 2.9 grams.

‘Poison’ Ring Star Sapphire, Diamond, 14k

Centering one oval-cut star sapphire cabochon measuring approximately 9.65 x 7.74 mm, accented by thirty-six silver-set, rose-cut diamonds mounted in 14k yellow gold with white and rose gold foliate accents, a threaded screw opens a hidden, hinged compartment, ring size 8 1/2.
Gross weight: 16.9 grams.

Seed Pearl, 14k Yellow Gold Horseshoe Ring

Designed as a horseshoe, accented by two rows of seed pearls, set in a 14k yellow gold ring mounting measuring approximately 1.03 x 1.00 inch, size 7 1/4.
Gross weight: 12.2 grams.

Pair of Emerald, Pearl, 14k Lyre Earrings

Each designed as a lyre accented by baroque pearls, topped by one square step-cut emerald weighing approximately 0.15 ct., set in a 14k rose and yellow gold earring mounting measuring approximately 1.85 x 0.60 inches.
Gross weight: 5.2 grams.

Pair of Michael Taylor d'Orsay Ottomans

Each with a nail head trimmed leather upholstered seat raised on Neoclassical curved supports. Joined by a floral boss
Bearing plaque; Michael Taylor Design, San Francisco.
18in (46cm) h. 20in (51xn( w, 14in (35cm) d.

Attributed Hugh Collins (Scottish, 1834-1896

Children and a Kitten, 1868.
Oil on canvas, signed and dated (lower left), framed.
27 x 20in. (68.5 x 50.7cm).
33 x 26in. (83.8 x 66cm/frame).

Regency Inlaid Walnut Carlton House Desk

After a design by Thomas Sheridan. The slide out leather inset writing surface surmount by cross banded and line inlaid U-shape arrangement of drawers and cabinets, and a central mail slot. The down swept divided cabinets swinging outward to reveal hidden drawers, all raised on tapering legs ending in spade feet. Altogether demonstrating the cabinetmaker's skill.
42in (107cm) h.. 46in ( 117cm) s. 25in (63cm) d

Once a year in the gorgeous Gerstle Park neighborhood - you don’t have to.

Every June, over 60 (!!) households in one of San Rafael’s most beautiful and historic neighborhoods simultaneously throw open their garage doors and invite the public in for a HUGE garage sale!

This is Gerstle Park Garage Sale Day. It’s been running for 31 consecutive years. And it is one of the best-kept secrets in the Bay Area.

This Historic Neighborhood Itself Is Worth the Drive

Gerstle Park is tucked into the hills of San Rafael and is one of Marin County’s oldest residential neighborhoods, with homes dating back to the 1880s. Victorian cottages sit next to Craftsman bungalows and Spanish Revival homes, shaded by old-growth trees that have been there for hundreds of years.

The neighborhood has deep roots in San Rafael’s Italian immigrant community, who began settling here in the early 1900s. Some of those families never left and there are households in Gerstle Park today where the same family has lived for three, even four generations.

Gerstle Park's homes are the stuff of legend - I wrote about one of them in May where there was a historic estate sale in a literal fairytale home!

Read more

Community is really what it’s all about:

Meet Gina Silvestri - she’s the president of the Gerstle Park Neighborhood Association, established 1953, still going strong, and the woman who has kept this tradition alive for years.

When I asked her what she hopes for the future of Garage Sale Day, she didn’t hesitate:

“I hope that the tradition lives on and that people continue to describe the sale as they did 30 years ago: ‘The neighborhood was packed with serious bargain-hunters having FUN!’ and ‘The Gerstle Park neighborhood showed that it knows what community spirit is all about.’”

Every June, she coordinates this single-day, neighborhood-wide sale, over 60 households registering, posting descriptions of what they’re selling, and opening their doors to whoever shows up.

And that doesn’t include the last-minute pop-ups: neighbors who wake up that morning, catch the energy drifting through the windows, and start dragging boxes to the curb on impulse.

Hundreds of people come to shop. Dealers arrive before the 9am official start, hunting for collectibles. Families come with strollers and kids clutching ten-dollar bills.

Regulars download the map the night before, highlight their targets, and arrive with a gameplan.

Gina describes the day, with characteristic understatement, as “a nice flow of people walking around the neighborhood.”

31 Years and Counting

The first Garage Sale Day was held in 1995. Gina tracked down the original neighborhood newsletter to show me how it was announced:

“Proceeds will come back to you in the form of continued events, services and newsletters.”

Thirty-one years later, that promise still holds.

Here’s the part that genuinely surprised me: the second annual sale, in 1996, drew 66 registered households. In 2025, there were 61. The numbers have barely moved in three decades. Whether that’s a cosmic coincidence or proof that a neighborhood finds its natural rhythm and stays there, I find it quietly beautiful. Some things don’t need to scale.

And because those families have held onto their homes, and their garages, for generations, what surfaces on Sale Day reflects over 100 years of accumulated life. As Gina put it:

“Lots of relics are known to come out of garages on Garage Sale Day.”

You can score big as a buyer!

I went through last year’s full Craigslist listing, every registered household posts a description ahead of time, and the range is honestly staggering.

A 1959 Schwinn girls’ bike. A Honda Reflex scooter, ready to ride. Dozens of $5 LP records, including a Beatles White Album. Vintage wicker furniture priced “crazy low.” A lifetime carpenter offering mystery surprise boxes. Hand-folded altered book sculptures the seller branded “Bookagami.” A full beading collection described as a “Beader’s Bonanza.” Brand new sales rep samples of candles and eyeglass frames. Designer women’s clothing like Lululemon, Anthropologie, Fabletics. A moving sale where the listing literally read: “Help us unpack by taking these items off our hands.”

And then there was this listing, which might be my favorite thing I’ve ever read on Craigslist:

“A not-dead-yet sale, along with a recently-moved sale. Let our unwanted crap become your beloved find! We always have a lot of fun doing this.”

That’s Gerstle Park in a sentence. A community that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but takes care of each other deeply.

The Story That Says Everything

Of all the moments Gina has witnessed over 31 years of running this event, one has stayed with her.

A woman was participating in the sale for the very first time and needed help writing her listing description. Together, they landed on this:

“My first garage sale in 87 years - getting ready to downsize!”

She got more customers than almost anyone else that day.

That story says everything about what makes this different from scrolling Facebook Marketplace at midnight. It’s not just about the stuff. It’s about the 87-year-old woman deciding to open her door. It’s about the stranger who stops, reads that sign, and decides they have to go in. It’s about what happens when a neighborhood collectively decides to be generous with its history, and its stuff.

It’s Also Great for Kids

The sale always falls the day before Father’s Day, perfect for last-minute gift hunting. But it’s just as good for families with kids in tow.

Gina’s brother brought his three young children every year and handed each of them $10 to spend. Those kids are now in college. And on the seller side, neighborhood children reliably set up lemonade stands and homemade cookie tables - tiny entrepreneurs with a built-in audience of hundreds of shoppers walking right past.

One listing last year promised “the best lemonade in town.” I believe them.

Why This One Is Worth It

Gerstle Park won’t claim to be the biggest garage sale in North America. But Gina believes it’s likely the longest continuously running neighborhood sale of its kind in all of Marin County.

Thirty-one years. Every single June. Sixty-something households, hundreds of shoppers, a neighborhood that has been doing this since 1995 and shows no signs of stopping.

How to Get There

📅 When: Saturday before Father’s Day, 9am–2pm

📍 Where: Gerstle Park neighborhood, San Rafael

🚗 Driving: From Highway 101, take the Central San Rafael exit. Head west on 3rd Street. Turn left on B, C, D, or E Streets. Park and start hunting.

🚢 From SF: Golden Gate Ferry to Larkspur → SMART Train to Downtown San Rafael. A genuinely lovely way to spend a morning.

🗺️ The map: Download it at gerstlepark.com the Thursday before the sale. Every registered sale includes a description — read it the night before, build your route, show up ready.

Paper maps are also available at the sales themselves, if you’re more of an improviser.

Thank you to Gina Silvestri, President of the Gerstle Park Neighborhood Association, for sharing 31 years of history, old newsletters, and some genuinely great stories.

If you’ve ever driven through Gerstle Park in San Rafael and felt like you were passing through a different era (the oak-lined streets, the Victorian homes, the quiet that doesn’t quite belong to modern California) then you already understand why what is happening this weekend matters.

One of the most extraordinary private residences in Marin County has just sold. And before the new owners move in, the family who lived there is opening the doors to the public for an estate sale.

Everything inside is going. The art. The china. The antique furniture. The jewelry. The Radko Christmas ornaments collected over a lifetime. Treasures gathered from all over the world, housed in a home that has stood since 1890.

This is not a typical weekend sale. This is a once-in-a-generation moment to walk inside a piece of Bay Area history, and take some of it home.

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The House Itself

Built in 1890 as the carriage house on the Schloss family estate, this property sits at the top of a quiet hill in Gerstle Park, San Rafael’s oldest neighborhood, known for its rare concentration of Victorian and Craftsman architecture. From the street, you might miss it entirely. The exterior is simple. The entrance is hidden from the road.

But step through the front gate and the world changes.

A towering oak greets you. Walk into the main courtyard and a 500-year-old redwood rises overhead, older than the Gold Rush, older than California statehood. Lush lawns, winding garden paths, three detached cottages, a fruit orchard, and beehives spread across the grounds.

It was, for decades, the Gerstle Park Inn, one of the most beloved bed and breakfasts in all of Marin, voted the number one hotel in guest satisfaction in San Rafael before it quietly closed in 2013. Many of you may have stayed here, or known someone who did.

The family who purchased it after the inn closed made it their private sanctuary. And now they are ready for the next chapter.

The History Behind It

To really appreciate what you are walking into, you need to know the story.

In 1850, two young Jewish Bavarian immigrants arrived in California with almost nothing. Lewis Gerstle and Louis Schloss had come chasing gold.

They scraped by: Gerstle sold fruit from a stand in San Francisco, worked as a day laborer in the mines, ran the first Pony Express route in Sacramento. Eventually the two men went into business together, first a grocery, then a mining brokerage in San Francisco. They also, as it happens, married sisters - the Greenebaum sisters, (also Bavarian immigrants) making them not just business partners but family.

Their real fortune came later, when the United States acquired Alaska from Russia. Gerstle and Schloss secured a multi-million dollar contract for dry goods and the Alaskan seal fur trade. Their Alaska Commercial Company became one of the most powerful enterprises in the American West. Two men who arrived penniless had built an empire.

And they spent their summers here. In Marin.

In 1881, Gerstle rented a San Rafael property called Violet Terrace and fell so in love with the land that he bought the five-acre estate outright for $15,000. Schloss purchased the adjoining lot two years later, building a grand three-story home for his six children and nine servants. Every year from late April through October, both families left their adjoining mansions on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco and came to this hill. Children ran through the orchards. Weddings were held in the redwood grove. As families grew, more homes were built. At its peak the estate had 36 bedrooms and 16 bathrooms.

Then time did what time does. The city razed most of the structures. In 1955, an arson fire destroyed the main Schloss house. What survived was the carriage house, the guesthouse, which became the Gerstle Park Inn.

\And now this property, this survivor, holds one final open house.

What’s Inside

The family who lived here collected beautifully and broadly. Across a life well-traveled and well-lived, they brought home:

Art - paintings, prints, and decorative works gathered from years of collecting, the kind of pieces that look like they belong in a home with 135 years of stories behind them.

Fine China and Tableware - sets and individual pieces that speak to a household that took entertaining seriously, the kind of china that turns an ordinary dinner into an occasion.

Antique and Eclectic Furniture - from elegant period pieces to more unexpected finds, the interiors of this home reflect a collector’s eye that was never afraid to mix eras and origins.

Jewelry - personal pieces with real character, the kind you don’t find at a mall.

Radko Christmas Ornaments - a remarkable collection from the iconic American artist Christopher Radko, whose hand-blown glass ornaments are beloved by collectors across the country. If you know, you know.

And much more!

Why This One Is Different

Estate sales happen every weekend across the Bay Area. Most of them are fine. Some of them are great. This one is singular.

Because you are not just shopping. You are walking through years of history. You are standing in a courtyard where a Gold Rush family held summer picnics in the 1890s. You are under the same redwood tree that has watched over this land for five centuries. You are touching objects that belonged to people who made this corner of Marin what it is.

The Gerstle family, for their part, eventually gave their estate to the City of San Rafael as a public park, which still carries their name today. Their generosity shaped this neighborhood permanently. The park your kids play in, the streets you walk on a Sunday morning - that is their legacy.

This estate sale is your chance to hold a small piece of it in your hands. And it will take place Friday and Saturday, May 129th and 30th, 9am - 2pm. Exact address and full list of items sold will be shared a day before the sale on my Instagram.

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If you love a good story behind a beautiful object or a historic home, follow @bydanzi on Instagram - there's always more where this came from.

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Most developers build things and move on. The Foster family built a city from scratch, out of nothing but mud, and then, they built themselves a tower right next door so they could keep watching it grow and lived in it for 40 years!

That tower is still there today. It’s called The Towers, at 20 West 3rd Avenue in San Mateo. And right now, for the first time in nearly two decades, one of its most spectacular units is available:

Unit 601 - a 2,800 sq ft, 2BR/2.5BA corner residence listed at $3,000,000, with views stretching from San Francisco to Oakland and down past the San Mateo Bridge. Listed by Susan Herman of the Clay Herman Team at Compass, it’s one of the most historically significant listings on the Peninsula.

Here’s why.

“Let’s Build a Town and Call It Foster City”

The year was 1958. The national flag still had only 48 stars. A real estate developer named T. Jack Foster Sr. had just come out of a short-lived retirement in Pebble Beach. He was restless.

His sons - T. Jack Jr., Dick, and Bob - had scattered across the country and Hawaii, each running different corners of the family’s development business. Their father called them back to California to work on a project together.

They traveled up and down the state, from Sacramento to Santa Cruz, looking for land with potential. Then someone told them about Brewer’s Island - 4 square miles of tidal mudflats sitting in the marshes of the San Francisco Bay, just east of San Mateo.

A soggy, inhospitable expanse of Bay mud. The Fosters saw something else entirely.

“Here was this parcel of 4 square miles of vacant land in the midst of the Bay Area, with several million people living there,” T. Jack Jr. later recalled. “It was so unique to have such a huge piece of vacant land there.”

After engineers assessed the site and reported back on what could be done, T. Jack Sr. turned to his sons and said simply: “Let’s build a town and call it Foster City.”

Building Land from Water

Brewer’s Island wasn’t really land - it was Bay mud, barely above sea level. To build a city there, the Fosters had to manufacture solid ground: crews pumped sand 24 hours a day for six years, depositing more than 14 million cubic yards of material. By 1962, T. Jack Sr. had poured $4.7 million of his own money in before a single home was built, and ultimately secured over $85 million in state bonds to fund the rest.

The first family moved in 1964, paying $23,500 for a four-bedroom house. Today the average Foster City home trades near $2 million. And when devastating storms hit in 1982, surrounding cities flooded badly. Foster City didn’t take on a drop.

What made Foster City remarkable wasn’t just the engineering. It was the philosophy. While California cities sprawled haphazardly along strip-mall corridors, the Fosters built from a master plan: neighborhoods designed around parks and lagoons, industry kept separate, architecture held to a coherent vision. The result was something rare - a place that looked like someone actually meant it to look that way.

It became a national model. Forbes ranked it among America’s Top 25 Towns to Live. Visa and Gilead planted headquarters there. Peter Thiel grew up there. Today it has 33,000 residents and roughly one murder per decade.

After Foster City, the Fosters Built Themselves a Home in San Mateo at The Towers

By the time Foster City was substantially complete and thriving, T. Jack Jr. and his brother Dick found themselves in the business they’d always been in: looking for the next project.

They were shown a lot in downtown San Mateo, in the Baywood Knolls neighborhood near the corner of West 3rd Avenue - walking distance from Central Park, steps from El Camino, with sweeping views across the Bay toward Oakland and San Francisco. They liked it. They bought it. They developed it.

The result was Foster Tower - a luxury residential high-rise built in 1980 that stands today as one of the most distinguished addresses on the Peninsula.

T. Jack Jr. moved in as the building’s very first tenant. He stayed for the rest of his life - over 40 years.

From his unit, he could see from San Francisco to Oakland and all the way down past the San Mateo Bridge. He could, in other words, see the city his family had built.

“The view is pretty special,” he told an interviewer from the Baywood Neighborhood Association when he was 90 years old, still living in the tower.

The building - now formally known as The Towers - is everything you’d expect from a developer who spent his career sweating details in Friday engineering meetings.

The 1980 construction brought full-service amenities: a 24-hour doorman, heated pool and spa, sauna, gym, game room, media room, and a shared rooftop deck with panoramic views. Two assigned parking spaces per unit. An electric gate. A voice intercom system. The HOA covers water, sewer, insurance, landscaping, and door staff.

It is, by any measure, a Peninsula trophy building.

Unit 601: A Closer Look

Now that you know the building’s story, here’s what’s actually for sale.

Unit 601 is a corner unit on the sixth floor - 2,800 square feet of open, light-filled living with hardwood floors, high ceilings, recessed lighting, and a fireplace in the living room. There’s a formal dining room, a library/den perfect for working from home, and a chef’s kitchen with a breakfast nook, wine cooler, and hood-vented cooktop. The primary suite has a walk-in closet and a generous en-suite bath. A small private patio off the kitchen offers an outdoor retreat. In-unit washer/dryer and central AC are included, along with two deeded garage spaces and private storage.

The full building amenities - heated pool and spa, sauna, gym, game room, media room, shared rooftop deck, and 24-hour doorman.

HOA is $2,319/month, which covers water, sewer, insurance, landscaping, and door staff. The unit last sold in 2007 for $2,000,000 and has been in the same hands ever since.

The listing is held by Susan Herman of the Clay Herman Team at Compass. Susan Herman, DRE #00688139, can be reached at (650) 400-4383 or susan.herman@compass.com. A full virtual tour is available at 20w3rdave-unit601.com.

Why This Matters for Peninsula Buyers

There’s a version of this story that’s just about a nice condo. And Unit 601 is absolutely a nice condo - one of the finest available anywhere in San Mateo County right now.

But the building it sits in carries weight that most Peninsula listings don’t. The Fosters didn’t stumble into this neighborhood. They chose it deliberately, built it meticulously, and then lived in it for decades.

T. Jack Jr. was the building’s first resident and its most loyal one. The man who project-managed the construction of Foster City out of a Bay mud flat picked this exact address as the place he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

If you’re a Bay Area resident thinking about what it means to buy into a building with genuine provenance - one that was built by the same family that built a whole city from the water up - Unit 601 at The Towers is worth a serious look.

For more information on this listing, contact Susan Herman and Austin Herman of the Clay Herman Team at Compass: (650) 400-4383 | susan.herman@compass.com

Full listing: compass.com/homedetails/20-W-3rd-Ave-Unit-601-San-Mateo-CA-94402

A child’s face. Oversized, liquid eyes that seem to hold entire lifetimes of longing. Something between sadness and wonder. You’ve seen them on kitsch prints in your grandmother’s hallway, in a Tim Burton film, in the DNA of every anime character, every Powerpuff Girl, every wide-eyed Yoshitomo Nara figure that hangs in a gallery today.

Those eyes belong to Margaret Keane, and for years, the world was told they belonged to her husband.

Fine Estate has her art this weekend. Before you scroll past, let me tell you why that matters.

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Fine Estate is holding their sale Friday, Saturday, Sunday,

10am - 5pm, 502 Irwin St, San Rafael.

A Woman Who Painted from a Locked Room

Her signature style wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was survival.

Margaret Keane’s paintings are recognizable for the oversized, doe-like eyes of her subjects - she said she was always drawn to eyes, and used to draw them in her school books as a child. But the origin of her obsession runs deeper than aesthetics.

When she was two years old, her eardrum was permanently damaged during a mastoid operation. Unable to hear properly, she learned to watch the eyes of the person talking to her in order to understand them.

She was born Margaret Doris Hawkins in Nashville, Tennessee in 1927, and by the mid-1950s she had made her way to San Francisco. She first rose to prominence in North Beach, where her distinctive big-eyed children captivated the public and quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

Then she met Walter.

Walter Keane began selling her characteristic “big eyes” paintings immediately, but unknown to her, claimed the work as his own. A principal venue for his sales was the hungry i, a jazz club in San Francisco.

When Margaret discovered what was happening, she stayed silent. She later explained: “I was afraid of him because he threatened to have me done in if I said anything.”

One of the most commercially successful artists of the 1960s, a woman whose work hung in middle-class living rooms across America, whose paintings were displayed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, whose portraits were commissioned by Joan Crawford, Natalie Wood, and Jerry Lewis, was painting from fear, in secret, while another person signed her name to the canvas.

The Paint-Off That Changed Everything

Margaret Keane left Walter in 1964 and divorced him a year later. In 1970, she announced on a radio broadcast that she was the real creator of the paintings attributed to her ex-husband. Walter denied it.

The reckoning came in a San Francisco courtroom in 1986. A federal judge, frustrated by competing claims, did something almost unimaginable: he ordered both Margaret and Walter to pick up a brush and paint, right there in the room, in front of everyone. Walter declined, citing a sore shoulder. Margaret completed her painting in 53 minutes.

After a three-week trial, the jury awarded her $4 million in damages.

Why She Matters Right Now

Margaret Keane was a woman whose creative output was systematically claimed by a man who was louder, more socially connected, and more willing to construct a mythology around himself. She painted in silence while he worked the room.

By the early 1960s, Margaret had become one of the most successful living artists of her time. Her art ignited the “Big Eyes” movement of the 1960s, influencing artists including Lee, Gig, Maio, and many others.

The Big Eyes aesthetic helped shape toy designs and popular culture, inspiring Little Miss No Name dolls, Blythe dolls, and even The Powerpuff Girls.

Her influence can be seen in the work of artists like Yoshitomo Nara and Mark Ryden.

She is the invisible root of so much of what we consider contemporary pop art.

San Francisco’s Artist

The hungry i in North Beach. Union Square, where a “paint-off” between Margaret and Walter was staged for the press (he didn’t show). The gallery she maintained in San Francisco, which holds the largest collection of Margaret Keane’s art in the world. Paintings she made of figures connected to this city, including Tony Morabito, former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, whose portrait now hangs at Levi’s Stadium.

She lived here. She fought here. She won here. And she kept painting here until she passed away in Napa in 2022, at 94 years old, having sketched nearly every single day of her life.

When you walk through North Beach now and duck into a café, or wander past the old jazz venues, you’re walking through the exact geography of her early career.

This Weekend: Fine Estate

What you’re actually buying when you buy one of these paintings.

Fine Estate has her work available this weekend, and it’s worth paying attention to.

Keane’s works have sold at auction for up to $120,000, with paintings averaging around $7,151 in the past year. But beyond the market, there’s something more interesting at play when you consider owning one of these pieces: you’re acquiring a work made by someone who painted despite everything. Despite being silenced, denied, threatened. Despite critics dismissing her work as sentimental kitsch while the public lined up to buy it.

Those big eyes aren’t sad for no reason. They carry the weight of a woman painting her truth in a room she wasn’t sure she was allowed to call her own.

Her paintings are now housed in the National Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Brooks Memorial Museum, among many others. The critics who once sneered have gone quiet. The paintings are everywhere.

What to Look For

A quick field guide for walking in without feeling lost.

If you’re heading to Fine Estate this weekend with her work in mind, a few things worth knowing:

The early pieces, 1960s oils, the ones painted under Walter’s name or just after the divorce, tend to carry that signature weight. Dark backgrounds, solitary figures, eyes that hold grief like still water. The later work, after she moved to Hawaii and then back to California, brightened considerably.

Lithographs and prints are the most accessible entry point, and they still carry her signature. Original oils are the prize.

Most of all: look into the eyes. She learned to read everything from eyes because she couldn’t always hear. She painted what she knew. And what she painted was the interior life of people who felt overlooked, unseen, small.

There’s a lot of us in those paintings. That’s why they never went away.

Fine Estate is holding their sale this weekend. Margaret Keane passed away in June 2022 at 94. Her Keane Eyes Gallery in San Francisco remains the largest single collection of her work in the world.

There is a moment, when you walk into the home of a great artist after they are gone, where you understand something about their work that no gallery wall could ever tell you. It is not the paintings or the sculptures that teach you this. It is the chair they sat in. The books stacked on the side table — their own books, their own name on the spines, handled enough that the covers have gone soft. The light coming through a particular window at a particular angle that clearly meant something, because the chair is angled exactly toward it.

I had that moment inside Fletcher Benton’s San Francisco home.

Benton died in 2019 at eighty-eight years old, still working, still bending steel in his San Francisco studio until close to the end. He had been one of California’s most celebrated sculptors for more than five decades, his work lives in the Smithsonian, in public plazas from San Francisco to Tokyo, in the permanent collections of museums across the country.

And yet walking through his home, what struck me most was how quietly he lived alongside his own legacy.

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Ohio to California: the arc of an unlikely life

Fletcher Benton was born in 1931 in Jackson, Ohio, the son of a coal miner. Nothing in his upbringing suggested the trajectory that followed. He worked his way through Miami University in Ohio painting signs and doing commercial illustration, practical work, the kind that pays for tuition when no one is handing you anything. He graduated in 1956 and almost immediately headed west.

California in the late 1950s was a particular kind of freedom for an artist. The Bay Area had a scene that was genuinely experimental, less burdened by the weight of New York’s institutional art world, more willing to let strange things happen. Benton arrived and never left. Over the next six decades, he would become as much a part of the city’s visual identity as the fog itself.

In the 1960s he was making kinetic art, sculptures with motors, programmed movement, works that changed over time. This was genuinely avant-garde territory. He showed internationally and was recognized as one of the leading figures in kinetic sculpture. Then, in a move that surprised many, he largely abandoned movement and returned to static form.

It was a bold pivot. Most artists find a language and stay in it. Benton threw his away and built a new one from scratch, and the new one turned out to be the one he would be remembered for.

The geometry of disruption

The work Benton became famous for has a deceptively simple premise: take a geometric form, a square, a circle, the letters of the alphabet, and fold it, bend it, torque it. Interrupt its logic. His Folded Square Alphabet series took the most orderly thing imaginable and found the sculpture hiding inside each letter.

What made it remarkable was not the concept but the execution. Benton worked in Cor-Ten and painted steel, often at monumental scale, pieces that stood ten, fifteen, twenty feet tall and weighed tons. They were installed in plazas and lobbies and parks, where people encountered them without expecting to, where a commuter might glance up and stop walking for a moment without quite knowing why.

Inside his home, the scale was different. The paintings on his walls, some his own, many collected from artists he admired, were intimate in a way his public work was not. There was a blue geometric canvas in the living room that felt like a private conversation with his own vocabulary, a thought he was working through for himself rather than for a plaza. On the coffee table: stacks of his own monographs, worn at the corners. He read about himself. He was still thinking about the work.

San Francisco was not a backdrop. It was a choice.

Many artists of Benton’s stature eventually migrate toward New York, drawn by the galleries and the collectors and the critical machinery. Benton stayed. He maintained his studio in San Francisco, kept his home in the city, and built his career largely on his own terms from the West Coast. This was not an accident or an oversight. It was a commitment.

San Francisco gave him something. The light, for one, that specific, diffuse Bay Area light that is neither harsh nor soft but somehow both at once. The culture of making, which in the Bay Area has always had a different character than elsewhere, more connected to craft, to material, to the act of building something with your hands. Benton’s background as a sign painter, his ease with commercial processes and industrial materials, found a more natural home here.

His public sculptures became part of the city’s visual identity in the particular way that only the best public art manages, not as monuments demanding attention but as presences that people absorbed without quite registering. San Franciscans grew up walking past Benton’s steel without necessarily knowing his name. That anonymity within recognition is a specific kind of legacy. It means your work has become infrastructure.

What a home reveals

Walking through the house, I kept returning to the same thought: this was a man who looked carefully at everything.

The objects were not random. The home is filled with art - his sculptures and posters of his work, his friends’ paintings, and his daughters’ sketches on the walls. You can spot small replicas of his kinetic sculptures all over the home. There is even a golden and silver collection of pins in the shape of his art.

And the mid-century furniture alone could stop you, with two black Eames lounge chairs, two Barcelona chair sets, beautiful desks and so much more.
It looks like the man who made monumental steel also loved cats because you can see some art showing cats around the home. And he clearly loved his kid’s vintage toys because he savored them in mint condition.

I was also taken back by the kitchen, which is adorned floor to ceiling with a bold blue mural: large botanical shapes, somewhere between Matisse and a midcentury wallpaper pattern. It was the most surprising room in the house and somehow the most revealing. Benton couldn’t turn it off. Even in the kitchen, the walls were a composition. And the shelves are lined with whimsical kitchenware.

The whole house was like that. Nothing accidental. Nothing performed. Just the accumulated choices of someone who looked carefully at everything and never stopped.

The things he left behind

Estate sales are strange events. They are an inventory of a life, priced and tagged, open to anyone who shows up on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday morning. The objects that accumulated over eighty-eight years will scatter now to new homes, new contexts, new lives.

Some will go to people who know exactly what they have. The Fletcher Benton monographs worn soft at the corners. The paintings he collected because he loved them. Those will find their way to people who understand the weight of what they’re holding.

Others will be absorbed more quietly. A Wassily chair in someone’s living room. The Persian rug in a hallway somewhere. The periwinkle bedroom walls, painted over eventually by whoever comes next.

What won’t scatter is the public work. The steel is still in the plazas, still stopping people on sidewalks. The Smithsonian still has its Bentons. The Bay Area still has its sculptures, still being encountered daily by commuters who may or may not know the name.

But I’m glad I got to see the private version first. The version that only exists inside a home. The books angled toward the light. The chair facing the window. The kitchen walls that couldn’t stop composing.

That version will be gone soon.

Follow my Instagram @bydanzi to find out more details about the estate sale and the home.

If this moved you, share it with someone who would understand why a man’s chair placement can tell you more about his work than any essay.