West Coast Sprezzatura
We've got our own flavor
I find the Italian word sprezzatura infinitely useful in describing a certain kind of west coast style that permeates the food, landscape, fashion, and architecture of coastal California. There is no exact translation for sprezzatura in English, but Merriam-Webster defines it as:
“studied nonchalance : graceful conduct or performance without apparent effort.”
Coastal California has developed a specific language for dressing, building and decorating houses, planting gardens, and cooking that all boil down to a stylistic dedication to sprezzatura. This is a material culture of the unstudied, the loose, the celebratory and sensual. Historically, the key ingredient has been unselfconsciousness. Like my essays on Messy Sea-Salt Hair and Shabby Seaside Motels, there is a little more romance in something that is imperfect. The glamour of true west coast sprezzatura is rooted in not obsessing in a mirror. It has been about looking outward (and living), perhaps hedonistically and with a great tan, in the direction of the glorious outdoors.
Food
In the area of cooking, West Coast sprezzatura is high art. We do a lot of cooking at home in Beachtown Bohemia. Go to the farmer’s market or the beloved Tri-County Produce, and you’ll be halfway toward a memorable meal just by virtue of Santa Barbara County’s exceptional produce. The misfires in Beachtown Bohemian restaurants often seem to be about over-doing it for the sake of panache – about caving to a self-conscious desire to impress diners when its not necessary. In instances like this, the Alice Waters who lives in my head says: just let the vegetable do the talking! Here are some characteristics of meals with west coast sprezzatura: the cooking of a fresh fish on the grill, salads tossed with interesting toasted things from the pantry (nuts, tortillas, pepitas, sourdough croutons), a perfectly-steamed artichoke with butter, good crusty bread, and ice cream with berries. The key is that the ingredients be somewhat easy to obtain, produce be aching with integrity, and the entirety not overcooked or over-seasoned. A classic Beachtown Bohemian feast revolves around sensuality and simplicity.
I took it’s opposite to an extreme via the below unhinged cartoon series.
Architecture
Of the many building styles germane to the Coastal California landscape – there are a few that embody west coast sprezzatura in a pronounced way. Old craftsmen homes (i.e. bungalows), midcentury wood-shingled single story houses, Victorians that have kept their original details but maybe installed an outdoor shower on the deck, adobes, classic Spanish colonial style houses, beat-up Monterey colonials (bonus points for a heaving vine that covers the half the edifice.) You get the idea. Mies van der Rohe would not work as a Beachtown Bohemian architect: too many hard surfaces, not enough mess, no unkept wall of jasmine, no places to hide and make out.
The quintessential architects of a west coast sprezzatura are the designers of Sea Ranch, the lauded 1960s planned community on the Sonoma Coast in Northern California. Sea Ranch has sprezzatura because it was designed to respond to the topography of the landscape that it sits upon and then weather elegantly in the elements. Its wood exterior has been bleached by the sun and salt air over time, rendering it worn-in like a pair of loved Levis. I appreciate the assymetry to make it unpredictable and fun to explore. It’s luxurious because of the context (cliff over the Pacific) and the care of it’s construction, not because it’s fancy. I’d say it has a timeless sprezzatura.
The Undone/Underdone Garden
West Coast sprezzatura in the form of a garden is about the plants taking over and doing their thing without much water or intense manicuring. Given that we live in a continuously drought-stricken state, a garden that isn’t too thirsty is also just lower-key. It means that it’s a garden that demands less of you, as if to entreat you into the shade of its oak tree at the golden hour for a Tecate, rather than a sunset water dousing. A classic west coast garden with sprezzatura is not unlike an English walled garden – messy, wild, sexy, and perhaps appearing unkempt – but damn the bees are buzzing in a delightful frenzy. In contrast, a carefully trimmed boxwood hedge may feel like a lot of beautiful places, but it doesn’t feel like Beachtown Bohemia. If a west coast garden were a person, she might be in Ray Bans with her bare feet up, unperturbed by the absence of a coherent garden plan. Or much water.
Fashion that’s not trying too hard
If you grow up in coastal California, you are shaped by its soft and often predictable climate: clammy fog in the morning that by noon reliably burns off to unveil a bright seventy-degree day like a major chord. Due to this predictable sun, and the unbuttoned nature of the townspeople, most of the men I grew up respecting wore board shorts and flip flops most the time. Even the Mayor. The women I admired – my mother and her friends – often wore long narrow cotton dresses and usually a big straw hat. West coast sprezzatura was unexamined -- as though they had just rolled out of bed, slid a comb through their hair, slipped into the dress and carried on with the day. While fussing was seen as frivolous, expression was admired.
Wendy Foster
Sartorially-speaking, there are too many genres of west coast sprezzatura to list here. I love them all. They key is a nonchalance in fit, in an overall disinterest in looking expensive, comfort, and – my favorite – a tousledness that speaks to doing more interesting things than preening. In Montecito and Santa Barbara, the queen of west coast sprezzatura is the inimitable Wendy Foster whose shop has been a local treasure since 1977: crisp, tactile elegant everyday clothes (white blouses, jeans, straw hats, linen shifts – and often worn with a dash of something really worldly and fabulous like a Rick Owens belt.
Mollusk
The younger generations maintain the west coast sprezzatura at Mollusk, which is also a surf shop. Mollusk reminds me in cut and palette of the seventies clothes of my parents’ generation, but made with fabrics like organic cotton and hemp. The Mollusk shop always enchants me with their clever t-shirts, art gallery (California artists primarily, often surf or skate adjacent), bookshelves with titles from the likes of midcentury California legends like Lloyd Kahn, and handmade wooden vehicles by the rebel craftsman Jay Nelson. There are more places in town, but these two feel like two different pitches of the same note: Californian, optimistic, natural, and sensual.
Conclusion
Cultures shift and change, but I do hope we can maintain our west coast sprezzatura amidst the influences of a homogenizing internet. I remember when Ugg boots were just for surfers on frigid Santa Cruz dawn patrol runs. Now you see them in Covent Garden. There is a lot to admire and treasure in the material culture of Beachtown Bohemia. I’m here for it and I’m going to study and draw it dammit, until the avocado toast turns brown.
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Loved this one. My father made me avocado toast when I was growing up. I always thought he invented it.
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. Spot on my friend. xo