This is David Lee Hoffman’s kitchen. Hoffman, renowned for being one of the first importers of rare Chinese teas and introducing Pu-erh to westerners, is in a losing battle to keep the Lagunitas land he’s lived on for the last 40 years. 🌲 California once embraced people like him - those who bought land to build composting toilets, gray water systems, and solar panels to live off the grid and make a self-sustaining oasis in a part of the world that desperately needs this kind of ingenuity. Not ramshackle (there are those, too), but with engineering and architectural knowledge and a lot of creativity - I’ve known many, like our beloved Alan Scott who developed and refined brick, wood-fired oven building and worked as a jewelry maker and metal smith and built two of our ovens. Les Blank made a documentary about David called All In This Tea (2007), and this quote in The New York Times explains his draw to David - “Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art.” We were introduced to David by Marianne Weiner of Anna’s Danish Rye Bread (another west Marin gem of a human) and he introduced us to the Pu-ehrs and flowering teas he’s known for, and how to properly taste them and we thankfully switched from whatever awful stuff we used at the time which was something on par with Celestial Seasonings. Hoffman is now caught up in the same west Marin bureaucracy Alan and we faced in the 1990s, where his methods are so outside the norm that there are no benchmarks or precedents in the building department. In our case, we had to tell the county we were simply building a fireplace (and luckily had just the right person in planning to accept that angle). It was the only way to thread that needle and it paved the way for other bakers to build their own county-approved ovens. They did made us change the brick facing so that it was “washable” - you know, as one does for a fireplace. The kitchen above is beautiful to me. It shows decades of loving use and form following function. I want to sit there with tea and watch the shadows shift. It will no doubt be razed and replaced with cheap construction costing millions.