The couple behind Patina Farm on why great design comes from feelings, not rules

0:03This is Business of Home. I'm your host, Dennis Scully. Every week I'll be speaking to leaders and innovators from all corners of the home industry. My guests this week are Brooke and Steve Gianetti. Steve is an architect and Brooke a designer, but together the two of them have done a little bit of everything. From opening a shop in small town Tennessee, to creating homes for A-list celebrities, to caring for a menagerie of sheep, donkeys, goats, and highland cattle on their farm, Bettina Meadow. I spoke with Brooke and Steve about how working with animals informs both their lives and their business, how they keep clients excited over the course of a long project, and why designers should be curious about new technology, not fearful.

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1:58Whether you opt for hand-tufted wool, durable indoor-outdoor, or natural jute, Annie Selke's custom-sized rugs will always give you a flawless fit down to the inch. To learn more, visit AnnieSelke.com. That's A-N-N-I-E-S-E-L-K-E dot com. And now, on with the show. So, where does this story begin? Steve, do we start with you becoming an architect and that path? Is that a good place to begin? Yeah, I mean, I'd been doing it for quite a while, just doing architecture on my own, kind of worked for a number of people and then worked out of my house. And then had a client where I needed some interior design done and approached Brooke with the idea that she could help me out because the lady only needed a couple of kids' bedrooms to be designed.

2:59Well, of course, Brooke ended up doing the whole house and that started it all. Well, and take me back to how the two of you first met. Yes, yes. I picked him up at the Cheesecake Factory. I definitely want to hear that story. I was still in college. I was going to UCLA. I was actually living at home. I was out for drinks with a friend and we stopped into the Cheesecake Factory and Steve was there. He kept smiling at me during the whole time and then when it was time for me to leave I walked by and he actually said goodbye to me and I said goodbye and I actually got into the car with my friend And I said to her, you know, I don't know what this is But I feel like I have to say something to that guy and so I went back into the bar and Asked him if he'd be interested in going out sometime and it was a thursday night and he said sure and being very suave and very cool about things.

3:59He said, how about Friday, which was the next day? I told him I was busy, but I gave him my number and he picked me up at my parents' house on Saturday morning. And we spent the whole day together. Six months later, we were engaged and six months after that, we were married. And they said it wouldn't last, but married over 37 years. And it's been actually really fantastic beyond what I ever imagined or could have imagined back then. But apparently, we imagined it along the way. That seems so much a part of the story that you've woven over all these years, is these walks and these dreams that you shared together.

4:43Brooke, what were you doing originally and before Steve pulled you into a job to work on some children's rooms? I originally thought I was going to be a lawyer or some sort of professional in that respect. But when I met Steve and I, I immediately kind of became his partner in business. I started doing his invoicing and, you know, always kind of had more of a kind of mathematical mind. You know, it was very comforting to me. I am not totally comfortable with creativity. It feels like free fall to me. But I was more of the kind of the invoicer and, you know, accountant. Steve has never written a check in his entire life.

5:35What a luxury. Yes, yes. So, yes, so that's what I always thought I would do. And then when we had kids, I was, you know, CEO of our house. You know, I just took care of everything that was there. Yeah. And his business. But then I also, you know, I would design with him our own houses. And then I actually people would come to our house and ask me to design their homes, you know, friends of ours. And so that's kind of where I became a little bit more comfortable with that. Well, and interestingly, Brooke, you write in your most recent book about the design school decision. And you wrote about how Steve, if I understand, was cautious or hesitant for you to go to design school for fear that since it seemed to come so naturally for you, that the structure of a formal education might somehow spoil something for you.

6:35And it probably would have because that's where I'm most comfortable, right? I would rely on that. If they gave me a formula on how to do it, I'd probably be like, oh, okay, I'll just do that. If you gave me rules, I'd probably follow them. That was her greatest strength is just feeling things. And I think it's a lot of things that people lose. You get it educated out of you, your feelings. Did any of that have anything to do with your school experience, Steve? A little bit, yeah. I realized I was sort of stuck in this rule-based thought, and working with her, she was more like, oh, that doesn't look so good.

7:11I don't really like that. And so you had to get back to feeling stuff more than puzzling through it. It became more of an emotion-based process than a visual process. What emotion are you trying to create when you walk somebody into a room, how does it make you feel, was the main thing, not I'll get 100 pictures from magazines and put a board together and make it look like this thing. Which also made it hard to think about writing that first book. Because if you're writing a book about how you do this or why you do what you do, if you just say, I just feel it, it's a very short book. Well, and I'm curious, even the whole, the business seems so centered around patina, this word, what all of this calls to mind.

8:06And I wonder what that means and what you came to build on that. It actually came from the first book because we needed a title for the book. and we went to a, we would go to swap meets and we could, we'd collect stuff just for fun on the weekends. So we put all the stuff I liked on the table and all the stuff she liked on the table. She had fancy stuff. I had leather and brass and old gears. She had a guilt and, you know, linen and velvet and things like that. And we tried to find a thread that linked these things together. And the thread was, we like things that grew better with age and felt like they told a story and had a history.

8:53And antiques were better because you could see life in them. You could see where a kid had chewed on the corner of a table, or you could see where the paint had worn off where people opened the drawer. And it became the visual representation of the idea of designing from your feelings as opposed to designing visually. How did the University of Maryland look upon designing from your feelings and everything you just outlined, Steve? They weren't that into it. They almost beat it out of me. You know, so it was interesting because I had such a different background because I grew up around very ornamental classical design.

9:39but also around craft where guys actually put stuff up. And I was always drawing upon a much wider range of probably experience, visual experiences than the other guys. You know, we would work at the Monticello. I'd go down and put up crown molding or help fix something down there and then come back and be expected to design some modern building. And, you know, I'd toss a little something in there. You know, they always kind of thought it was a little funny. Toss in a little Thomas Jefferson and see how it went over. Thomas Jefferson here and there, just because there was so much cool stuff to draw from.

10:15The classical guys think it's heresy to do modern stuff, and the modern guys think it's heresy to put classical stuff in there. And when a guy takes both of them and smashes them together, then you got nobody on your side because you're insulting both ends of a thing. It made perfect sense to me, but not many other people. Well, so in the early days when you were getting jobs, Steve, I'm curious, what was attracting people to you and what were they seeing of your work or how did you win clients? Yeah, I mean, the early stuff was more traditional. And I could do it because I grew up around it. And I knew enough of the classical language to make stuff look good.

11:01And then after a while, I just, I got a little tired of doing, you know, classical colonial houses. And one of the reasons we built Patina Farm was to explore something completely different. I started looking at the Beta Plus books and all the Belgian influences, and they were doing a nice job of, a lot of them seemed like renovating old buildings and making them feel new and fresh. So Brooke and I sort of had the same idea for different reasons to build this place where we could show what we were really interested in, the field of dreams moment. it. If you build it, they will come. And so we built Patina Farm, which had steel windows and wood windows and sheets of glass and farm buildings and old Spanish stuff and ruins and vintage fireplaces and a shower that looked like the Apple store, which just made of sheets of glass.

11:58And people really liked it. We should explain. So Patina Farm, which is a beautiful coffee table book, but was your home that you created? And I don't know if originally you dreamt of all the animals and all of the floral... I think Brooke probably had that in her head from the beginning. Well, I mean, tell me, Brooke, I mean, is that sort of the vision that you had? Yes, it was. I mean, when we lived in Santa Monica, I already knew that I wanted a different kind of lifestyle and was kind of morphing our life in Santa Monica more towards that life. You know, we got chickens and put them in our side yard in Santa Monica.

12:41We dug up our front yard and turned it into raised planter beds. And it gave me a sense of calm and made me really happy. So when we started talking about what was going to be at Patina Farm, I definitely saw animals, even to the point where we went. It was also kind of evolved. Like when we moved to Patina Farm, which is in Ojai, California, we went to the Ventura County Fair and we saw these miniature donkeys. And I thought, wow, they would be perfect. And how can you see miniature donkeys and not want to bring them home, right? Exactly. So that's where it really all started. And then you just kind of dip your toe in And next thing you know, you're waist deep.

13:29And next thing you know, you're up to your neck. Highland cows. Well, and what do you really think? I mean, you mentioned earlier, Brooke, that it was giving you a sense of calm or peace. What do you really think was drawing you towards having all these animals and what they came to represent for you? A connection to nature and being more in sync with nature. They live in the moment. you need to live in the moment when you're with an animal. They can tell if you're thinking about something else. Something can go terribly wrong if you're not there. And just seeing the way they live, the way they interact is truly inspiring.

14:15And you just kind of feel it when you're with them. It's very soothing. It's very calming. And it's outside yourself. It's this idea that you you are taking care of them, which is wonderful as well. It gets you out of your narcissism. Sure. No, no, no. I hear you. We all can get very wrapped up in our own heads. And as you say, it's a great deal more challenging today to stay in the moment and animals make you do that in a wonderful way. Absolutely. It gets you off a screen for sure. And they don't care what's going on. Although they do look adorable on screen, they don't care. They don't care if they're influencers or not.

15:00So you built this incredible patina farm, and suddenly all these people see this place and want you to help recreate, I assume, elements of it, if not all of the components that you were living with animal-wise. They certainly came to love the look and feel. And so did that become the big driver for the kind of work that you suddenly found yourself doing? Yeah, it became a lot more about that. Both the sort of architectural look, but also the lifestyle. We got quite a big job here in Nashville because the owner went to the house and wanted that sort of lifestyle. And it started this whole journey.

15:43So it worked from the standpoint of realigning the work with our values. because it became a bit of a filter. The kind of people who would want to live with animals were the kind of people we liked. You know, you could tell what somebody was like of how they treated the goats. You know, you could just sort of, it was like a little client filter. And it became a showcase for not only designing the house, but the interiors and the gardens. And people loved the idea of just only having to deal with one group of people, me and Brooke, to do their whole world. And so, so many jobs came through that.

16:23So I would be doing furniture plans as I was drawing floor plans and Brooke would be picking materials as we were doing preliminary design. So the whole house gelled all at once. And did you have to scale up in terms of a team to help support all of these efforts when clients started to come to you? You know, we actually scaled down when we moved from LA to, I had an office when I was in LA, maybe had 10 people working for me. But one of the things moving to Ojai was, how do I have a completely remote office? It was completely remote before remote was cool. We use a couple of technological things.

17:06So everything runs through a program called Base camp, which is basically a collaborative framework for everybody to be able to see everything that's going on all the time, all my staff and all the clients can watch everything in real time. And so it made, I could design at four o 'clock in the morning, I'd send it to my people to draft it or build the models, then it would go right to the owners and everything could happen faster because we weren't trying to get everybody in the same room to do something. We could work together, kind of all asynchronously to create this thing. And it actually ended up being a much better way to work for me.

17:53We never had a dream of doing thousands of projects. you know we never had a dream of having you know a huge operation we we like to go deep you know into a project and just do you know a few really great things and do it that way then um then kind of just being a manager of a bunch of other people you know it's again that kind of idea that if if it just turns out that you have a ton of projects and you have a bunch of um different project managers, all you're doing is going, you know, you kind of lose the vision, you know, it just gets diluted. You know, you're not, you got it. You have to have eyes on it.

18:34It has to be controlled all the time.

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19:33so was it the client with the 500 acres in in in tennessee that that got you excited about uh moving to to tennessee because suddenly you're moving from ojai and packing up the animals and Yeah, absolutely. Well, part of it became, Brooke's blog got very popular, especially during COVID. And we tried to do visits to the farm, you know, just small events with 20 people doing a tour. Well, the homeowners association and the city of Ojai did not like that. we needed you know the california i don't know all these crazy rules that they had and we just got sick of the rules of dealing with it and said well we're going to go someplace where they don't have so many rules and at the same time i was working on this project in below nashville out in the countryside and i would you know facetime brook from the drives or facetime or from a bar looking at an open mic night and you know in the little town leapers fork where we actually end up having our store now.

20:34And we started talking about it. And then she came out and we drove down these roads right near our house. And it was like, this starts to feel more like home than home does. Also, being a California girl, I also just kind of fell in love with the idea of having these seasons. I never had seasons. And along that idea of slowing down, when you're in California, you go kind of from one 75 degree perfect day to another one. Oh, yes. You know, but, you know, I know that sounds like, you know, it's a terrible problem to have, but it was wonderful. We loved, you know, the weather in California, but the idea of having seasons and having, you know, changes and appreciation and then appreciating the autumn leaves, which is what we're having right now, which is spectacular, you know, And also, it gives you a sense of the passage of time, which I think in this part of our life is really important to me, to understand that it's not forever.

21:43You know, when you're younger, it seems like it's just forever, and it's not. And California has a tendency to make you feel like it's forever because it's the same all the time. and uh and this this you know there's winter there's you know these and you realize that things pass no indeed and fall is actually my favorite season of the of the year and it's spectacular and the colors and the change in the air and everything about it i i'm mad about fall so the thought of the thought of being forced to live in los angeles and have to experience the same weather every day. That's just torture. But Steve mentioned how your blog had become so popular and so many people wanted to show up and experience.

22:31So let's talk about your blog just a little bit because that did become another way that so many people discovered you and sort of fell in love with this lifestyle that the two of you were creating. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I started my Velvet and Linen blog in 2009. It became quite popular to the point where it kind of started overtaking our life and I decided I needed to slow down. And then Instagram came up and so I started doing Instagram because it felt more manageable. I still named it Velvet and Linen. I named my blog Velvet and Linen because it kind of described my design philosophy, be kind of that high and low and that mix and everything like that.

23:13Little did I know that, you know, it would be, you know, so many years later, 15 years later, and I'd still be, you know, the velvet, you know, a lot of people don't even know my name. They just know me as velvet. You're the velvet linen girl. Sure. Exactly. Exactly. So, so that's kind of how it started. And then it really, when the pandemic happened and everybody ended up getting, you know, being stuck inside, A lot of people discovered us through Facebook and Instagram and started watching these videos we were doing of our animals because, you know, it was a way for people to connect to that lifestyle, you know, when they're just sitting, you know, stuck in their houses.

23:55And it was a wonderful thing to be able to bring that to people. So that's kind of how it all started. And it's been wonderful. But yes, so we wanted to kind of have a more in real world experience and weren't able to. And so it's been very exciting to kind of explore that here in Tennessee, first with the opportunity to open our store in Leapers Fork, which we also named Patina Home and Garden. And that has been wonderful meeting so many people and becoming part of a community so quickly after moving here. And then after building our farm more Patina Meadow now and having a place to gather here at the farm, exploring what that looks like.

24:46And with Layla also, because our daughter has now become an integral part of this all. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I'm imagining has also perhaps changed the tempo for you both a little bit. So in the midst of all of this comes this Architectural Digest cover with Jennifer Garner and this incredible home that you've created for her. And she tells this charming story. Brooke, I think you call it Steve's monkey trick where Jennifer Garner pours her dreams of a home out to Steve and magically he comes back with a beautiful watercolor and suddenly that becomes the home and all of her dreams realized apparently.

25:38Is that how it all went down? Pretty much. Yeah, that was coming up, yes. We had done a couple of projects with her, different kinds of things. So I knew enough about her, but I kind of pick up on people and what they want and just kind of walk them through a story. And my monkey trick is I see the house finished as they're talking about it. To the point many times where when I show up to an empty site, it's a little weird because I expect the house to be there. Because I visualized it so completely. So she had this dream of this place. And so I said, you know, we could make it feel like your home or like your childhood home, like an old farmhouse, because she had a desire to kind of slow down as well.

26:24But she had to stay in L.A. You start to develop a like a rule based approach to it. Like these are all the things I want to feel when I'm in the place. It wants to feel cozy. I want to be connected to the outside. I want a fabulous kitchen with a fireplace in it. So there were all these pieces that started to come together. And I just started to see it. And I did a couple of sketches for her. And she sort of held on to this one sketch throughout the whole process, going through permits and all that, just saying, I know it's going to be great because I can see it right here. And when the magazine comes out, does this huge explosion of awareness and interest happen in your world?

27:05Tell me the effects. Tell me what happens for you. Yeah, I mean, we got a lot of calls on it. There was a lot of people who reached out who thought it was a great piece because it was so lovely with the video that she did and everything like that. Takes you through on a tour, the whole thing. Sings your praises. I know it was lovely, but we're so out in the middle of the country, it's not like you're going to run into people at a cocktail party going, oh yeah, I saw you in the AD. Getting published like that has never been the goal for us. It has always been almost just a byproduct. I mean, she was the one that brought up wanting to put her house in it because she liked it so much.

27:47Recently, when we were talking, Steve, you talked about sort of helping clients to sort of hang on through what you know is going to be a lengthy and challenging process. And you've both talked about trying to get people so bought into this dream and this vision, and not just of what their home is ultimately going to look like, but what their lifestyle is going to become as a result of this home. And I'm curious how you keep people engaged. How do you keep them pursuing that dream, seeing that vision, holding that lovely watercolor that you've done for them and say, oh, you know, when you know the custom sofa is going to take 20 weeks and heck, the permitting might take a couple of years, all of that.

28:41I mean, how do you keep them going? It always seems to me that you have to get to a design that is so compelling that they just want it, that they just want to live there. And I can tell when it's close, but it's not there. They're just not excited about it. And you need that excitement in the beginning. And what it does is you draw, you build this image of it in the distance. they have to sort of treat it like it already exists and you have to keep thinking about it that way and i ask people to imagine their day in the house when we're designing it i don't really think about it like think about this room you know it's think about a saturday a slow saturday morning with the kids where are you how does it work and so what it does is it builds muscle memory of a house that doesn't quite exist that you really want to live in.

29:40Like this dream that you've had, that's going to be so compelling that it's going to be worth slogging through it. And occasionally when things are going a little slow, you might do a couple of sketches, kind of bring them along. You might do some better renderings. If things are getting a little top. Brooke will pull a whole room of fabrics together that people can touch. Or finding a great old mantle or something that gives you a sense of what, again, that kind of attaching to the history of an old piece, or maybe it's just a great old antique we found, and that can kind of set a tone for a room.

30:22And that even gets a client excited about what that space is going to feel like, you know, so there are kind of ways to get people kind of moving towards what, what will be versus being kind of stuck in the soup of what is. Yeah. Yeah. I ask him in part, because as we've talked about in the past, things are taking longer, things seem to be costing so much more and having to explain that or re-explain that to clients as you go along seems tougher, honestly, than it's ever been, really. Part of the reason for getting out of California was the process was just got more onerous all the time. And it just, you know, you didn't want to spend two years getting a permit to build something, you know, or three years getting a permit on the, in the California coast to do something.

31:19My dog is snoring.