Mayacamas Home mixes old and new
Shawn Hall was upcycling shabby long before it was chic. It was how her mother got by as a single mom in St. Louis and then Southern California: polishing up homes with a little paint and inexpensive fixes and foraged finds in exchange for a break in rent.
They used to set out on hunting expeditions through Hollywood on pick-up days and grab furniture that had been set out on the street.
“I used to laugh that my mom could paint an entire set of kitchen cabinets with what was left on the lids of paint cans,” she said.
Hall learned all the tricks as a willing apprentice, and parlayed the skill — along with her own creative eye for combining old and new — into a successful interior design business specializing in restaurants and winery tasting rooms.
For years, she was the go-to designer for a string of popular watering holes from Willi’s Seafood in Healdsburg to Hopmonk Tavern in Sebastopol. She has left her distinctive mark on 42 restaurants and numerous winery tasting rooms with an ethos of sustainability.
Hall loves to re-imagine and reinvent things, including her own life. After 11 years running her own restaurant, The Gypsy Cafe, in Sebastopol, she is remaking herself once again, and as usual, weaving a little bit of old with a little bit of new.
“I feel like I’m Jane Fonda in my last chapter,” she said, “and I’m creating one last run. I thought I was semiretired but that doesn’t work for me. I have to work. I have to do a million projects at once or I’m lost.”
She’s back doing interior design and has been tapped to do new tasting rooms for Truett Hurst and VML wineries for a second time.
She’s also now trying her hand at retail. Her new shop in Kenwood called Mayacamas Home: Modern Vintage Goods offers affordable items that reflect her casual, eclectic, often quirky style, from rugs and pottery to table linens, pillows, side chairs and small tables, some that she makes herself from disparate salvage pieced together in new ways. Little things to uplift the look of a home at low cost and will fit in your car.
Her vision extends to the entire property. She’s working with the new owner Rami Batarseh, (who also revitalized Fulton Crossing into a lively gallery space,) to improve and beautify the entire Highway 12 parcel, which was a little down on its heels but still has a rustic patina that works well with Hall’s salvage aesthetic.
She’s stirring up energy with activities and events she hopes will make it a community hub with a series of events, from antique fairs and art shows to concerts and workshops.
She sells bouquets at the shop fresh picked from her own garden and plans to have tomatoes and other summer produce as the season progresses because she loves tomatoes, a reminder of her early childhood days eating the real farm-to-table food at her grandfather’s farm in the Ozarks.
Aside from the venerable Swede’s Feeds across the highway and a small market, Kenwood is a retail desert. Hall wants to fix that.
Her shop sits between another gift shop, run by Swede’s co-owner Aspen Mayers, and The Zapata Grill, a Mexican food truck and outdoor eatery with an inviting sit down space.
Everything in the shop reflects her own eclectic taste which is very much evident in her own home, a contemporary rancher personalized with intriguing objects from travels, vintage signs, antique salvage and lots of art, including her own travel photos of architecture and vignettes of scenes and “stuff” from the flea markets and brocantes she haunts.
Her photographer partner prints them on watercolor paper or handmade paper and mounts them in frames they make themselves. They look like actual paintings.
“I’m glad to be out of actually making food but I’m still supporting entertaining,” she said from her expansive Oakmont garden, which might be straight out of Victoria Magazine with scads of blooming roses and flower covered arbors. “My store is full of housewares to make the home nice enough to come over and share food with friends and family,” Hall said.
With the price of eating out skyrocketing, Hall predicts a resurgence in home entertaining and nesting, even among the millennials who are now settling into their 30s and 40s and want nice serving plates and tableware, even if it’s just for takeout.
A committed environmentalist since she was an Environmental Studies major at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, she relies on bamboo and other sustainable resources. That gels with her commitment to reusing and upcycling with nontoxic finishes.
“If it’s not too in your face I just have things that were in the past somewhere and it makes people feel at home. I’ve always had luck with that,“ said Hall, who switched from landscape design to interior design after she was recruited to re-imagine the old Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco in the 1980s.
