Atelier Delphine People: Lauri Kranz & Dean Kuipers
Learn about Lauri & Dean and their stories.
LAURI & DEAN X ATELIER DELPHINE
I first met Lauri Kranz about 8 years ago at the Echo Park Craft Fair. My husband, photographer Yoshihiro Makino, later met Lauri and her husband Dean Kuipers when he worked on their book A Garden Can Be Anywhere: Creating Bountiful and Beautiful Edible Gardens (Abrams, 2019) - a sumptuous how-to guide on organic gardening and essential methods for growing abundant organic food.
Lauri Kranz is the founder of Edible Gardens LA - through gorgeous gardens created for her clients that include both chefs, families and anyone with interest in having a home garden, Lauri shares her philosophy that nourishment and beauty are not separate goals. With decades of experience she has been at the forefront of a gardening revolution, where more and more people are craving a patch of land for growing healthy, organic food from their own gardens.
Dean Kuipers is a journalist, author and editor with longstanding interests in ecology, politics and the arts. He grew up in Mattawan, Michigan, graduated from Kalamazoo College, and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books, including co-authoring A Garden Can Be Anywhere: Creating Bountiful and Beautiful Edible Gardens profiled on NPR’s “Cultivating Place,” KCRW-FM’s “Good Food,” Newsweek, and Architectural Digest.
Lauri and Dean opened LA HOMEFARM in Glassell Park in 2022 - it is the first brick-and-mortar store from Edible Gardens LA, a neighborhood grocery and farm market and a source for beautiful home and garden goods from the best makers in Southern California. They specialize in fresh, naturally grown produce and flowers from small, local farms (including their own). Because great meals involve artistry from the food to the plates, LA HOMEFARM also offers one-of-a-kind artisanal home and garden goods and an array of special gifts.
Their mission is to increase access to food grown locally, responsibly and deliciously. The long-term goal is to empower every community to produce its own healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate farm goods. They encourage the development of new local distribution networks and farms, which in Los Angeles often means urban and backyard farms, especially in neighborhoods that may be food deserts or have no farmers markets or regular source of high-quality produce.
The store in Glassell Park is surrounded by neighbors such as Bub and Grandma's, Dunsmoor, and Plant Material - with Queen St., Fondry and Vidiots further up the road. We enjoy going to Queen St. for early supper together (Lauri and Dean are such early risers!) and love the vibrancy and community of the Glassell Park and Eagle Rock neighborhoods.
I am excited to share a little bit of their stories: a snippet of our conversation below, with photos taken in their shop as well as during a trip to the Hollywood Farmer's Market. Lauri and Dean wear styles from our Core Collection and 2024 Collections.
Atelier Delphine: Lauri, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you describe yourself to strangers? For instance, are you a farmer? An artist?
Lauri Kranz: I think we are many different people at different times in our lives. I have worked as an agent trainee at a talent agency in New York City; made music with my band, Snow and Voices; and designed, built and tended vegetable gardens which became Edible Gardens LA. At this moment in time, I would describe myself as a shopkeeper. I feel very proud of that title.
Our store, LA HOMEFARM, is a labor of love that brings Dean and I so much joy. It is wonderful being part of such a beautiful community – neighborhood families and individuals, farmers, artists, chefs, people visiting from further away. I am so inspired by the energy and passion of everyone this shop has brought into our lives.
AD: How did you and Dean meet, and when?
LK: We met at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2012. It was an opening for Doug Aitken’s installation, “Song One.” We both lived in Los Angeles and had the same group of friends, but somehow we had never met. We said hello and there was a jolt of electricity and well, here we are!
AD: Can you share a bit about your career before the gardens? And how was the transition?
LK: Before moving to Los Angeles, I was living in New York City and writing songs. I don’t think I had touched soil in years. It wasn’t until I had my first child and he started school in Los Angeles that I found my way into gardens. There was a list of volunteer jobs at his school and I needed to sign up for one of them. I saw gardening on the list and I remembered gardening with my own father growing up and thought, well this might be nice. I showed up to the first gardening class for the students and I was hooked. I fell in love with gardening. I took every book out of the library that I could find on vegetable gardening, built a test garden at home and started helping other people with their own home gardens. I now can’t imagine any other path. Maybe everything in my life led me to the garden.
AD: How do the gardens affect your state of mind, or your quality of life?
LK: One of the most powerful things the garden does for me in my life is mark the passage of time. A seed goes in the ground when the weather is cooler, and cloudy, maybe it’s mid-December. We tend the seed, water it, use compost, more water. At some point there is a sprout, a stem, then leaves. Maybe it starts to bud, flower, fruit and then in a burst of vibrant colors and new life there are flowers to cut, vegetables to harvest, fruit to pick. It is suddenly spring! April or May maybe June, this garden that was just a wish is now in full bloom. I have spent the last several decades of my life marking the passage of time with the seasonal cycles of the garden.
AD: How did Edible Gardens start? How do you work with clients to build the best garden? And how did that help create LA HOMEFARM?
LK: Edible Gardens LA started with the birth of my second child. He went to a different school than my older son. That school didn’t have a vegetable garden, so I asked the head of the school if I could start one. She lovingly said yes and I built a garden and started a gardening program there. Some of the parents who saw that garden asked if I would help them with their own garden at their home. I did, and then their friends saw that garden and asked me to work with them on a garden. Edible Gardens LA was born out of those first few gardens.
When I meet with a new client, I work to find the best location on their property for an edible garden – an ample amount of sunlight, protection from wildlife in the form of a garden house, if needed, and consideration of what they want to grow. But I also want this garden to enrich the lives of these clients; for instance, maybe it should be close to the kitchen so they can use it easily for cooking, or maybe it should be a destination with a table and chairs for sitting in the morning. A garden should bring happiness and a sense
of well-being. My hope is that it creates new life in both the landscape and the person whose garden it is.
When the pandemic hit, I stopped going to the gardens. We were all so worried and didn’t yet know how Covid spread. Dean and I had been growing food and flowers on a property in Glassell Park for about six months. Friends who knew this asked if they could get produce from us. We had some crops in the ground, but not enough for all of the people who were asking us for vegetables. We called the farmers we had known for years, including Peter Schaner, Alex Weiser (pictured left), James Birch and others. They had extra produce because all of the restaurants were closed, and they needed to move it. We all worked together to get the fresh vegetables from their farms to people in their homes. Within a week, Dean and I were delivering fresh produce boxes to customers across Los Angeles.
After two years of making deliveries, we realized it would be best if we had a location where people could also come to pick up produce. We got lucky with a great location just down the hill from our farm in Glassell Park, and it took a year to build out that space. We opened in November 2022 as LA HOMEFARM.
AD: How do you perceive Atelier Delphine clothing? Every time I see you in our clothes, you wear it so naturally, and the fabric really flows on your body. I am always convinced those cottons love you.
LK: I think Atelier Delphine clothing is a beautiful reflection of the woman who creates it – soulful, grounded and a source of great and natural beauty.
AD: Do you have any upcoming news about LA HOMEFARM that you want to share?
LK: We are planning on opening a second location of LA HOMEFARM!
AD: Dean, can you tell us a bit about yourself as a journalist / author?
Dean Kuipers: My very first job, age 13, was working on a flower farm in Michigan, and I worked there three summers. But I tried to escape the farm life by becoming a writer. There were lots of jobs in music magazines in the 1980s, so when I finished college I took an internship at an experimental music magazine called EAR in New York City in 1987. My very first night in NYC, I met John Cage and had a long talk about music process with Laurie Anderson: I thought, “This is better than farming.” My first story was about the virtuoso accordionist, William Schimmel, and the second was a cover story about Sonic Youth. My path was very clear after that, though it was never very straight.
I became a staff writer at Spin, where I wrote about rock music and also about radical environmentalism. Those two subjects were my main focus for decades. Growing up in rural Michigan, wildlife and wildlands were part of the functioning of my mind. I admired the people who used direct action to address environmental problems: I wrote a book about Rod Coronado, who went after the mink fur industry in the U.S. by destroying the research labs that supported mink farmers. He was very successful, got caught and spent time in prison. I love writing the stories of tree-sitters who stop old-growth logging, or marine activists like Paul Watson who stop whaling boats, or grandmas who stop trains delivering oil from the tar sands in Alberta. Considering how rapidly the world is heating up, I think developing tar sands is much more “radical” than anything an activist can do to stop it.
I was an editor at RayGun magazine, probably the most fun position I ever had, and worked closely with a lot of musicians, including David Bowie, and great graphic artists including the late Vaughan Oliver, Chris Ashworth, David Carson, Jerome Curchod and so many others.
A RayGun cover story led to a lifetime friendship with artist Doug Aitken, and we did a book together called I Am A Bullet and I worked on his film, Diamond Sea, and many other projects.
After working at the Los Angeles Times, I left in 2012 to pursue environmental stories and books full-time.
I became fascinated with solutions such as renewable energy and organic farming and environmentalist campaigns. I spend a lot of time interviewing people who are shifting our culture to a less deadly trajectory.
AD: You are known for writing about the environment: tell us how working with the soil has impacted you, psychologically. Has anything changed since you started farming and working with food?
DK: Working with the soil has taught me that our minds work in collaboration with our environment. The vast majority of what we “know,” in our minds, is actually produced by other living things in the world around us. Cognitive science since the 1970s has taught us that other species have minds, and as we learn more and more about how other living things communicate (like trees and farm plants), I believe it is accurate to say that most of the cognition that we consider to be our own thoughts is really cognition of nature all around us.
I first wrote about this in my 2019 book, The Deer Camp. My two brothers and I struggled to have a relationship with our father all of our lives, and finally we all agreed to do some habitat restoration work on our cabin property in rural Michigan. When we removed a tree plantation and restored a natural forest, our father changed. When the new trees came up, a new father arrived, and we finally achieved a loving relationship. Our dad was overjoyed by the success of the forest and he attributed this to us. This showed me the true depth of our psychological connection to the soil.
I started interviewing psychologists and people who experienced mental illnesses as a result of climate change disasters. For instance, a group of people in Santa Rosa who had PTSD after the 2017 Tubbs Fire. It is now estimated that over 1 billion people worldwide are experiencing some negative mental effects from climate change. This tells me a lot more about how our minds are part of nature and how science can help us understand how our minds are part of a minded nature.
When Lauri and I started our Edible Gardens LA Farm, our urban farm was in bad shape. Yoshi took photos! Everything was dead. We had some bad feelings about the place. But, just like with my father, restoring the farm to health is also a way to restore well-being to our minds. I have learned, like so many psychologists who work with distressed clients, that the very best way to achieve well-being about our future is to work on solving the problems. If you want to feel good about the world, restore a piece of land. Change our fossil fuel usage. Fight for better climate policies. Working in our store every day, supporting the work of very good growers and makers who use sustainable methods, makes us feel optimistic. Action is the way to feel good!
AD: Can you share a meaningful experience as a journalist?
DK: In 1992, I went up to Idaho to write a story about activists who were trying to stop the cutting of a very large forest in the Salmon River system. A former insurance executive had purchased 20 acres of private land in the middle of the cutting area and parked a bus there, calling it the Ancient Forest Bus Brigade. I had just published a big article in Playboy called “Eco-Warriors,” and it was all about people who used direct action – like buying property, or sitting in trees – to save the wild places.
On our way out to the area in conflict, a photographer and I stopped to eat in a café in Dixie, Idaho. It’s a sawmill town. The lady who took our order asked me if we were writing a story about the conflict, and I said yes. Then she said, “Did you see that big article in Playboy?” I didn’t answer, but my photographer said, “No, we don’t know that article, tell us about it.” And she said, “Oh, it’s just terrible. It’s about environmentalists who think trees are more valuable than people. Can you imagine?” This was before the Internet. The written word is very powerful.
AD: Is there anything that you would like to share about the relevance of your work to the environmental
challenges we face?
DK: Annie Dillard noted that the science of botany is especially important to us, scientifically and philosophically, because “the world turns upon growing.” Our lives rely on the growth of plants. Growing plants and animals requires farmers. High-tech solutions do not make good farmers; tech companies create systems that cut off the necessary connection between people and the soil. They also make systems that are too expensive for regular people, and the power to grow has to remain with regular people. Good farmers put seeds in the ground and tend them. These jobs are hard and psychologically risky, and climate change is making the job much, much harder. We are seeing a slow movement toward small farms, and we need to support that movement. Small farms can grow mountains of food and support communities. Communities that are connected to their food – where we live in concert with the seasonal produce and animals – are a key to our mental health, too.
AD: Can you recommend some of your books and films and tell us what they are about?
DK: Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke (2006). The story of two gay marijuana activists in Michigan who put on big festivals to legalize pot and who were both shot and killed by authorities in 2001.
Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American
Wilderness (2009). Indigenous activist Rod Coronado tried to cripple the U.S. fur trade by destroying the scientific research into nutrition and disease that supports mink farms. He eventually went underground and eluded the FBI for years until he was finally captured on the reservation
of his Yaqui tribe near Tucson.
Ray Gun Out of Control (1997). Beautiful design pages from Ray Gun Publishing magazines and essays about the relationship of sound and print by Dean Kuipers, William Gibson, David Bowie, Rick Poynor.
The Deer Camp: A Memoir of a Father, a Family, and the Land that Healed Them (2019). How a project to restore wildlife habitat on my family’s land in Michigan allowed my brothers and I to find a new relationship with our dad.
A Garden Can Be Anywhere: Creating Bountiful and Beautiful
Edible Gardens (2019). A how-to written by Lauri and I on growing great organic food, chock full of tips, stories, blueprints for a garden house and raised beds, and lists of seasonal crops to grow.
“Diamond Sea” (1997).
An impressionistic film by Doug Aitken about the huge diamond-mining zone in coastal Namibia, which was closed to the public for about 100 years. I did research and sound for the film.
AD: Your lives together are very rich and full of meaningful projects. You are creating so much beauty in the community. Can you describe your goals or your mantra in one word or one sentence?
LK & DK: The land is community. We are so thrilled every day to see people walk into our store, into our gardens, into our books, and reaffirm their relatedness to the land.
AD: Is there anything more you want to do together – for instance, the direction of LA HOMEFARM, new projects, future work?
LK & DK: One dream is that we could move onto a piece of land where we can grow food and flowers, entertain friends, mentor others, write, play, and enjoy our children when they are home. A centralized place where we can do even more of what we do now. Who knows where that will be?
