It was Thanksgiving Day four years ago when Kara Chine dragged her husband, Jeff, and their two kids, Olive and Jack, to Coast Highway 101 before 7 a.m. to watch the annual Encinitas Turkey Trot. She didn’t know anyone racing
that day; she was there doing a little research.
“It was great,” she says. “Nearly every person participating was wearing a turkey on their head or a tutu. There were people pushing strollers, people walking, people running, and I said, ‘These are my people; this is where I want to live.’”
Encinitas had just the right community feel in a walkable area near the ocean. It checked all the boxes on Kara’s neighborhood wish list.
At the time, she and her family were living in Rancho Santa Fe. “We were in a gated community, and while it was very nice, it felt soulless to me, and I used to tell my family that I felt like I was dying behind the gates,” she admits.
Living SpaceThe 850-square-foot remodel of the center of the Chine family’s Encinitas home now affords them unobstructed ocean views. The blue and gray furnishings in the room intentionally evoke the various colors of the sea.
Jenny Siegwart
A public school teacher, Kara longed for the tight-knit community feel she’d had in the Mission Beach and Ocean Beach neighborhoods, where she lived for nearly 20 years prior to getting married and having kids. So she began her quest for the perfect new home. She knew she wanted a house that she and her husband, Jeff, could live in forever—and not have to downsize when their kids (now 17 and 15) moved out. And she knew she loved Encinitas.
For his part, Jeff wasn’t opposed to a beach community, but neither did he want to feel like he was on top of his neighbors. So Kara began driving up and down the streets of Encinitas looking for properties for sale that would suit all of their needs. Her Realtors—Kevin and Ryan Dalzell, with the Dalzell Group at Compass—drove her by a property that wasn’t for sale.
The adobe-style ranch home, built in 1950, wasn’t exactly what Kara envisioned, but the halfacre property, on a hill with an ocean view, was ideal. “It turns out, the couple living there was thinking about downsizing,” she explains. “We bought the house without ever going inside.”
Initially, the Chines thought they were going to tear down the house and start from scratch. “But we lived in it for a year after buying it, and the house had a good energy, a good feel,” Kara says. The home also came with an interesting history: The original owner was Dorothy Spencer, an Academy Award–nominated film editor credited with shattering several glass ceilings in Hollywood.
Besides the good vibes the family felt there, leveling a house that had good bones started to feel like it would be throwing money away. What they wanted was a comfortable house for their family of four that didn’t feel too big, facilitated an indoor-outdoor lifestyle, and enhanced the ocean view, something the original floor plan’s tiny windows neglected.
Kitchen and Dining AreaKara found the turquoise handblown glass light fixture, which resembles bubbles and hangs over the dining table, from Sundance. It complements the blue porcelain AKDO tile that wraps the kitchen island and the teal glass on the sliding Eclipse pantry doors from Contractors Wardrobe, which cleverly hide an espresso and wine bar, lots of storage, and another countertop.
For the remodel, Kara went to a seminar hosted by Jackson Design and Remodeling and saw some projects that resonated with her colorful, artistic style. It took only one meeting with architect John Kavan to seal the deal.
“John brought a piece of art to our first meeting to show us his inspiration—and that was it, ” Kara explains. It was a work from Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter known for his bold, geometric designs. Kavan chose one of Mondrian’s works featuring the golden ratio, a mathematical sequence that produces aesthetically pleasing spirals in geometry. He overlaid the art on top of the plan and used those proportions in designing the Chines’ home. The challenging part came in marrying this modern, rectangular concept with the existing adobe-style home.
Kavan explains that he used the Guggenheim Museum in New York as a point of reference. The addition—by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, Architects, between 1990 and 1992—to the Frank Lloyd Wright building “didn’t match the original, but instead was deliberately contrasting.” Where Wright created an organic spherical shape, the addition is a rectangular tower.
Primary BedroomThe Torrey Pines State Beach image “is our favorite hike,” Kara explains. Juno poses in front of the adjacent ceramic, wood-like tile wall. Around the corner, a multicolor Forbo Marmoleum floor jazzes up the bathroom.
Taking a cue from the museum, Kavan let disparity lead his design. He cut out the middle of the house and designed a modern, industrial structure that seems to push through the existing adobe home on either side as it juts toward the ocean. He retained the charm of the old home, but modernized it with charcoal gray paint and an industrial metal roof in place of the old red tile.
And he added a second-story deck, accessed via exterior spiral staircase, where Kara, Jeff, and the kids can take in 180-degree ocean views.
Inside, what was once the living room became the couple’s bedroom, complete with the original ceiling beams and picture window but with new wall tile, floors, and paint. The space also includes a large attached bathroom and a walk-in closet. On the other side, the sun room was converted into Olive’s bedroom. Jack got the other room, and the office has a Murphy bed for guests.
Encinitas home / view
Jenny Siegwart
Encinitas home / living
Jenny Siegwart
Mondrian’s influence is most apparent at the entryway, where the front door, windows, and overhang were proportioned artistically. While the new great room, dining space, and kitchen feel open and unified, ceiling panels and lighting subtly designate each area’s purpose. Various sky and sea colors mingle here: teal, turquoise, gray, and blue with pops of Kara’s favorite color, orange. She already owned the Bertazzoni range, and she searched forever to find just the right pumpkin-colored bar stools. “Now they’re in every AT&T store,” she laments.
The space is impressive without being grandiose. The Chines wanted every decision, every furnishing and finish to make sense for their lifestyle and budget. Instead of installing custom cabinetry throughout the kitchen, the couple opted for a pantry with teal glass doors that slide to reveal a much more economical espresso and wine bar with ample storage. In their bathroom, Kara opted against colorful-but-costly tiles in favor of low maintenance, antimicrobial Marmoleum modular flooring in a whimsical checkerboard pattern.
Encinitas home / bathroom
Jenny Siegwart
Kara and Jeff made a conscious decision to support local artists, many of whom came to hang their pieces themselves. Josh Bernard installed his photo of Carlsbad State Beach in the entryway; Roy Kerckhoffs put up his image of Torrey Pines State Beach in the couple’s bedroom. At the end of the hallway, “The Dude” holds court—a conversation starter, for sure. “The Big Lebowski is our family’s favorite movie,” she explains.
At the same time they’ve made their home reflect the local scene, the Chines have become part of the Encinitas community. Jeff bought a Vespa to cruise into town to pick up coffee or takeout, the couple runs five miles together every other day at low tide, and friends and family pop by just to say hi, something Kara says never happened when they lived in the suburbs. Oh, and she adds that watching the sun set into the Pacific Ocean every night from their modern porch swing hasn’t gotten old at all: “We love this magical piece of the earth we get to call home.”
Encinitas Home / Family
Jenny Siegwart
Encinitas home / exterior
Jenny Siegwart
Everything SD
AUGUST 26, 2026
Your Kid’s Old Bedroom Is Ready for Its Next Chapter
From moody retreats to income-generating ADUs, San Diego parents are rethinking the rooms their children left behind
That was the question on loop in my head as I sat, nearly catatonic, watching my chickens scratch and crap, from a chair on my patio. It was the first Monday after dropping my one and only at college on the other side of the country. I was tired to the bone and in shock. Eighteen-plus years of permission slips, math homework, Barbie play (ugh), carpooling—my God, the carpooling—and a teenager who, for four years and counting, communicated almost exclusively through side-eye and not-so-under-the-breath clapbacks. Parenting is insanity, and when it stops, it feels so good and so bad all at once.
Photo Credit: Aaryn Belfer
I won’t linger on my personal recovery here, except to say: Part of moving on is dealing with that empty room. What do we parents do with the utensil vortex, and more importantly, when do we do it?
My daughter’s room sat for two years like a forgotten museum exhibit, preserved—not because I was sentimental, but because my husband was. While he didn’t want her to feel erased when she came home, I wanted to expunge her Totoro-meets-Pepto-Bismol gray-and-pink aesthetic, the sports jerseys, the inspirational stick-on decals from Etsy, the bazillion discarded beauty products that didn’t make it into the blue duffel bags.
My metamorphosis took a while, but I built a new, brilliantly free, empty-nest life. No more driving hundreds of miles a week, no more bleachers, no more ref whistles reverberating in my dreams. I reclaimed myself, then I hired a professional to help me reclaim my kid’s bedroom.
EBSCO’s Research Starters series says that “empty nest syndrome” is a real, if not clinical, diagnosis—no chart line, no billing code. Just a recognized experience of grief, loneliness, and diminished purpose that can take up to a year to resolve.
Creating a Sanctuary
Courtesy of Treci Smith
I turned to Treci Smith of Treci Smith Designs because I loved what she did with her son’s bedroom. (Full disclosure: She’s a friend.) After several interrupted attempts at reimagining the room, she designed a den for her husband, Amir. The couple, married 32 years, raised four kids in their four-bedroom ranch home in Bonita, and over the years, the kids switched rooms and pairings countless times.
The house Tetris continued as each child went off to college. But when their youngest left, his bedroom atrophied. It became a haphazard office and, for one stubborn stretch, nothing at all. A purgatory.
“We wanted to utilize every room in our house,” Smith says, “not letting it be a room that just sits empty.” She finally made a plan to evict purgatory, but the pandemic hit, and all four kids moved back home. It took a while longer before the room was finally hers to play with.
Courtesy of Treci Smith
What Smith created in its place is magic. It feels like a speakeasy. Dark, moody, and deliberately masculine, the den looks like how sandalwood and musk would smell if they took physical form. It’s got a bar cart, Amir’s cigars, a speaker, a desk for his real estate research, and French doors that open to a courtyard and pool.
“When we think of meditation, we think of light and airy,” Smith says, rejecting that there’s only one way to create calm. “It’s a sanctuary. It’s a place where the rest of the world doesn’t really feel like it exists.”
Smith doesn’t talk about trends. “I think everything has to have a purpose, and not just to be magazine-ready,” she says. “So I ask clients, ‘How do you want to feel in this space?’”
For my project, Smith isn’t interested in erasing the past so much as spotlighting it. As she guides me in reimagining my kid’s former room, she’s pushing back on my urge to wipe the kid out of it entirely. “I don’t want her to feel like she’s been pushed out of the house, essentially,” she says. “The room is now functioning for other purposes, but it’s still hers.”
She pulls a painting of my daughter off the wall in another part of the house for use in the new space. She also caught sight of a planed section of a pantry door from our last house, which has my daughter’s height marks in my handwriting, climbing as she grew. “Grab that,” she tells me. “It has to go in.”
That’s not just decoration. It’s continuity.
From Playroom to Paycheck
For years, the biggest room in Melissa Gaviria’s Rancho Peñasquitos house was a shared bedroom and playroom for her two kids—absorbing blocks, toys, and balls that, with impressive consistency, never made it into the ball pit. As the kids grew, the room saw less use, then emptied out entirely: Her older child moved out, her younger one moved upstairs.
Gaviria tried turning it into an office, but “that was just one little corner of a whole big room,” she says. When a coworker converted part of a house into an Airbnb-ready ADU, Gaviria was inspired.
She hired award-winning designer Jen Guerin of JG Color Studios to create a junior ADU. It’s technically attached to the house but is functionally its own unit, with a French-door entrance on the side so guests never have to walk through the home’s main living space.
Gaviria didn’t wait until both kids were gone to build her nest egg (the unit pays her mortgage, and she rents the whole house in the summer and travels). The kids were 14 and 10 when construction started, and she gave them markers and crayons for one last pass at the walls. I ask whether she left any of their artwork as an homage. She laughs, “I can’t rent with a Godzilla on the wall.”
I beg to differ there.
Photo Credit: Hali Makanah
Guerin pulled from Gaviria’s Colombian background, incorporating blues and a deep burnt orange as nods to home.
Guerin, who’s designed dozens of these transitions over 20 years, says most parents pivot more slowly than Gaviria. “It always starts with paint,” she says, “then flooring and slowly a replacement of all items.” But the instinct, fast or slow, is the same: “This chapter isn’t about erasing the family story. It’s about making room for the next one.”
Enveloped. Safe. At ease, creative, and a little bit sexy. I wanted an understated drama that didn’t match our minimalist, midcentury design elsewhere in the house, but that matched the inside of my soul. I wanted dark and light, color and whimsy. I wanted to never want to get out of bed, and for guests to feel that too.
Another parameter: I had a tight budget. I mean, let’s be real about the economy, right? Smith guided me toward a dark paint my husband and I put on ourselves, then sourced used and vintage pieces to go with the bed and other accoutrements we already had, and mixed in a few new pieces from Ikea—like the two-tone green speaker lamp. She nudged me not to erase my kid entirely, so I dug through boxes of ephemera in the garage, framed some old artwork, and tucked a few other mementos away for discovery, should someone look closely.
Most guests won’t notice. They’ll just sink into the bed and not want to leave, which is the whole point. But if you know where to look, my ladybaby is still in there—she’s just not running the place.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
Growing up in Carlsbad, I never quite understood why people vacationed there. What, so you want to check out the field where I have soccer practice? Pay my orthodontist a visit? Carlsbad just felt like a town by the beach, no better or worse than any other in the country. It took going to college out of state for me to actually understand just how rare a place like Carlsbad is.
Thanksgiving break my freshman year, my first time coming home after three months in the Midwest, my shoulders dropped. I rolled down the windows and drove to lifeguard tower 37—the hangout magnet for Carlsbad’s youths (and, in the summer, tourists)—and the smells of the ocean woke me right up like smelling salts do. I finally got it.
Carlsbad isn’t just a stopover town on your way to something better. It is the destination. Travel + Leisure named Carlsbad one of the top 50 places around the world to travel in 2026. From the whole globe, the travel magazine picked my home. Sure, we’ve got the Flower Fields and Legoland—but now it’s the smaller ships and indier dreams that are giving it street-level character.
It’s not just Carlsbad, either. People have talked about the “North County bubble” for decades—a force field that prevents its residents from traveling south of the 56. It’s often used derogatorily, and it’s a fairly accurate burn.
For decades, living up in North County meant giving up on culture, or at least culture within close proximity. But now, the main expansion of San Diego culture is happening up north. Central San Diego restaurants have started taking notice and are expanding into the area—spurred no doubt by Oceanside’s food boom and the Jeune et Jolie–Campfire–Wildland–Lilo constellation in Carlsbad. City Heights burger joint Key & Cleaver opened a new spot in Oceanside; the owners of Parc Bistro-Brasserie in Bankers Hill opened Parc Lounge in Rancho Santa Fe. Possibly the strongest market indicator is that Sam Fox—one of the most successful restaurateurs west of the Rockies—has started focusing on North County for his concepts. In 2025, he opened both The Henry in Carlsbad and Culinary Dropout in Del Mar.
For the ultimate insider guide, we found a handful of inspiring people who live and create and truly know six North County neighborhoods—San Marcos, Escondido, Oceanside, Leucadia, Rancho Santa Fe, and Vista—and asked them how they’d spend a dream day out and about in their town.
Courtesy of North City Farmers Market
San Marcos
San Marcos is in full renaissance mode. The biggest story is that the grand North City vision is starting to peek through the scaffolding. It’s essentially the North County Downtown that’s been written in the tea leaves and discussed whenever someone gets stuck in traffic at the 5/805 merge: a 200-acre, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use face-changer that’s slated for 2,600 homes, 350,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, 250 hotel rooms, and about a million square feet of offices and labs. Its most recent manifestation is 222 North City—a 12-story residential tower with over 450 residences, rooftop garden, pool cabanas, art installations, and almost 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail (Necessity Coffee, Buona Forchetta, Draft Republic, Milonga Empanadas, and a grocery store anchor on its way).
Which means Restaurant Row is no longer burdened with being the primary caregiver for the hungry or the socially inclined. Patricia Prado-Olmos has watched the city morph during her nearly three-decade tenure at CSUSM, having spent the past six years as the school’s chief community engagement officer. She also just announced her forthcoming retirement at the end of the 2026–2027 school year, so she’ll have even more time to haunt local haunts.
Meet the Local: Patricia Prado-Olmos
Those in the know call the university “Cal State StairMaster” from the Sisyphean amount of stairs on the hillside campus. So, any day at or around CSUSM should start with a homestyle carbo-load (biscuits and gravy) from Mama Kat’s.
“There’s something about this breakfast spot that immediately puts me in a good mood,” she says. Mama Kat’s is also known for its pie (strawberry-rhubarb), which is breakfast if you change your perspective.
After a few hours on campus—with a break to pet the university’s official therapy goldendoodle, Frank, who helps ease finals tremors or apprehension of on-campus stairs—Prado-Olmos will wander into North City, just steps away. She says the almond croissant and coffee at Christophe Rull Patisserie rival Parisian cafés: “It feels like the kind of place you’d stumble across in a much bigger city.”
Rull, a Michelin-trained pastry chef who’s done stints on Netflix (Bake Squad) and Food Network (Super Mega Cakes, Halloween Wars), opened his patisserie last fall. The hype hasn’t cooled off yet: Get there early because the crowds do.
Emma Veidt is an editor at San Diego Magazine. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the Missouri School of Journalism. She loves running, hiking, and rock climbing, but really, she mostly loves encounters with the street cats around North Park.
Inspired by the effortless charm of French cafés, this taste of France on Orange Avenue invites guests to embrace the simple pleasure of taking their time.
Strolling down Orange Avenue on a sunny afternoon, you’ll hear the hum of beach cruisers rolling by and visitors making their way toward the Hotel del Coronado. Dogs pause to greet one another on the sidewalk, palm trees sway overhead, and for a moment, you’re convinced you’re living inside the postcard from the gift shop you just passed.
Then the scene shifts. Towering white columns, black café awnings and gold-trimmed windows frame Little Frenchie, where woven bistro chairs spill onto the sidewalk and servers deliver bubbling crocks of French onion soup. The scent of caramelized onions and melted Gruyère is practically an invitation to ask, “How long for a table for two?”
That feeling of pulling up a chair and staying awhile is exactly what inspired Little Frenchie. French cuisine has a reputation for feeling a little intimidating, but the restaurant is rewriting that narrative with food and wine that feels approachable.
“Sometimes when you read a French menu, you come across words you can’t even pronounce,” David Spatafore, the owner of Little Frenchie, says. “We wanted to create a restaurant where people felt comfortable.”
Little Frenchie was designed to capture the spirit of the French sidewalk cafés that inspired it. Dating back to 1917, the space already carried the charm of a Parisian bistro, with architectural details that felt more at home on a European street corner than in Coronado. The team saw an opportunity to create a restaurant that matched the character of the space while filling a gap in the neighborhood.
The result is a French restaurant that honors tradition without taking itself too seriously.
At Little Frenchie, classic French techniques are at the heart of the menu, but there is always room for creativity. A cassoulet featuring Toulouse sausage and duck confit pays homage to the recipes and regions that inspired it, while a rich hot chocolate made with ingredients imported from France brings a taste of French café culture to Coronado.
The team loves finding unexpected ways to make familiar dishes feel new. A burger becomes a showstopper when it is finished tableside with melted raclette, while a French Dip gets elevated with prime beef and Wagyu makes its way into the burgers. Even Eggs Benedict gets a French twist, swapping the traditional English muffin for a buttery croissant. The GB&J, Little Frenchie’s take on a grilled cheese, brings that same playful approach with seasonal jam and French Brie layered into a comforting classic.
Nearly everything at Little Frenchie is made from scratch, with ingredients carefully chosen to match the restaurant’s standards. Even the bread receives special attention. Each morning, the team sends a car to Prager Brothers Artisan Bread to pick up freshly baked loaves, ensuring every element of the meal reflects the restaurant’s commitment to quality.
Wine is woven into the experience just as naturally as the food. Inspired by the effortless pairings found in French cafés and bistros, Little Frenchie’s by-the-glass selection invites guests to sip their way through different regions and discover new favorites without the pressure of knowing all the rules.
Edna Harper asked for one thing before she died: that the next owner of her iconic Mission Hills home keep the street-facing “garden.” Which is essentially asking the future residents to be curators of a whimsical and obsessive, delightful and strange, classic, cartoony and slightly unhinged sculpture museum. Harper, who died in January at the age of 87, poured her heart into this topiary bonanza, and it’s right there for everyone to see.
Like thousands (or millions, there’s no formal estimation) of others, I had scrolled through the photos of this topiary fantasia before I ever stood in front of it. As of this writing, Harper’s Topiary Garden is No. 227 of 2,686 Things to Do in San Diego on Tripadvisor, making it a popular tourist stop between fish tacos, a day at the beach, and a stroll in nearby Presidio Park. But crowdsourced photos quickly snapped in direct overhead sunlight tend to flatten the shapes that, while meticulously manicured, refuse to behave. In person, Harper’s figures seem to be in motion and, given that they’re sculpted out of bushes, they literally are. (I’d love to see a maintenance timelapse.)
Animals emerge out of shrubs as if they have impish ideas. A fanciful whale, a man in a sombrero, a random spiral twisting skyward, otherworldly creatures that defy categorization—all of these exist together in a neatly trimmed cascade pouring down the steep front slope of the property.
You don’t accidentally end up with a yard like this. You decide to create it and choose to cultivate it, and then you keep deciding and cultivating—for decades.
Although a consistent parade of looky-loos have visited over the years, most have never been inside the home, which is on the market for the first time since Harper and her husband, Alex (who died in 2020), bought it in 1969.
Courtesy of Christopher Delgado
“It was and is a landmark,” says Christopher Delgado, Harper’s cousin and trustee of her estate. “She specialized in Chinese brush art and Japanese art called ‘sumi-e,’ a form of Zen art. She was a creator … she was very, very talented.”
I can’t stop thinking about Harper, sitting at the kitchen window, looking down at her masterpiece and the watchers watching it. The image of Harper enjoying the joy the public took from her handiwork makes me want to understand the woman behind the work. Because topiary, as an art form, has always been a little… loaded.
Topiary has always had a bit of an identity crisis—and that’s part of its charm.
When I think of topiary, I immediately think: Fancy. French bourgeoisie. Palace of Versailles. Mais non! Topiary has its origins in Rome. According to the Center forArchitecture, the word “topiary” has its origins in late 16th century English, which combines the Greek word “topos” for place and the Latin word “topiarius” for ornamental gardner.
Photo Credit: Casiel Sanchez
Topiary started as a flex, really. A Julius-Caesar-adjacent pastime for the most ancient one-percenters; an expression accessible only to those with land, labor (or, put more plainly, enslaved people), and spare time. In its earliest form, topiary was about control: bending nature into submission. It’s where symmetry and precision signaled order, taste, and money.
But with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages that followed, the topiary almost preceded the Dodo Bird in extinction. Monks quietly kept the art alive by growing herbs and manicuring the gardens and hedges within the courtyards of their monasteries.
It wasn’t until the Renaissance nine centuries later when topiary saw a resurgence—ah, Versailles!—and this form of pleasure gardening went into overdrive. Nature became architecture. The French pruned their foliage into iconic cones and obelisks, walls to keep out the riffraff, and ornamentation designed to impress. The Dutch got a little freaky, as they do, and sculpted complicated figures, animals, and even furniture.
Inevitably, the pendulum swung again, and topiary fell out of favor once it became viewed as excessive and even absurd. Even so, it never really disappeared. It just migrated to exist in a completely different paradigm. It was less Versailles and more, “What if this bush were a mouse?”
Fast forward to Disneyland in 1963. That year, the park opened a topiary garden in Fantasyland with verdant sculptures of giraffes, camels, elephants, and hippos all inspired by Denmark’s Tivoli Gardens.
Disney’s interpretation of topiary—which is still a fixture of park decor today—falls more into the realm of imagination and possibility than restrained aristocratic performance.
That’s one of the stranger throughlines of topiary: It moves from elite to everyday, from stiff and formal to playful and silly, from symbol of control to something steeped in personal expression.
Which is what makes a place like Harper’s Topiary Garden so compelling and the woman behind it utterly intriguing.
Courtesy of Christopher Delgado
Born in 1938, Edna Harper was something of a Renaissance woman. She worked for two decades as a dental assistant, and she later became a notable painter, calligrapher, and stained glass artist (the house itself is adorned with her work). But she was also savvy in other ways.
“She graduated [with a degree in dental assisting] from San Diego City College and wanted to have her own money and her independence,” says Delgado. “Most people didn’t know that she was such a great businessperson, and for many years, she managed all of [the couple’s] properties on her own. She was great at building relationships … she touched a lot of people’s lives.”
Her friend and fellow artist Julie Roth attributes her artistry to her relationship with Harper. The pair met two decades ago at an art class at Oasis in Mission Valley.
“She was just the most encouraging person,” Roth says. “I didn’t know I could paint, but apparently I can. She was a tremendous person.”
I asked Roth what she’d want people to know about her friend.
“Her empathy and diplomacy,” she says. “[She had] a sharp eye for other talent. She spotted me, but I’m not the only one she encouraged.”
That sharp eye suggests attention, the same kind it takes to look at a bush and also see a whale. Or a spiral. Or something that doesn’t exist yet, but could.
Photo Credit: Casiel Sanchez
Nothing about Harper’s life suggests someone chasing attention. And yet, she ended up creating something that demanded hers, and she took great pleasure in seeing people enjoy her creations.
The garden didn’t happen all at once. It grew out of years of travel, observation, and collaboration. Harper often traveled without her husband, always returning from trips to Japan, Thailand, and other parts of Asia with ideas and impressions captured through sketches in a notebook.
“She would get creative ideas from her travels … she’d come back with ideas and pictures, and they’d go about cutting that topiary bush into shape,” Delgado says.
For the past 25 years, she had the help of her gardener, Pedro Duran—who’s still employed by the trust and has maintained the garden since Harper’s passing.
In the early topiary years, Harper worked closely with Duran in what Delgado describes as a kind of shared “labor of love.” She would share her sketches and together the pair would shape the bushes into something deliberate.
Photo Credit: Casiel Sanchez
“As she got older, she would increasingly draw her ideas and [Duran] would [carry them out],” Delgado says.
That collaboration reinforces that her garden was not an act of control, but one of creative collaboration and translation. From memory to sketch. From sketch to shrub. From something seen, somewhere else in the world, to something rooted in the soil of a steep hillside in Mission Hills.
Harper also made sure that the lawn’s boisterous energy made its way into the house on Union Street. Apparently, she threw legendary parties.
“Fairly regularly, in the late ’70s and ’80s, she would host Super Bowl parties with 200 people. She had TVs everywhere,” Delgado says.
It’s not hard to square that image with the stillness of the garden which, despite the careful pruning and intentional design, is voluminous and nearly vibrating.
And, damnit, I wish I’d watched some sportsball on her shocking number of TVs and wandered out front to the topiary—slightly wine-drunk with an orange smear of wing sauce on the corner of my mouth—to marvel at the leafy hippo and this woman’s elaborately creative life.
Photo Credit: Casiel Sanchez
I can hear Delgado smiling as we talk on the phone. He’s going back to his childhood, when he talks about being one of the cousins Harper doted on when he visited.
“The adults were inside, and we’d be out in the camper,” he says, “and [Harper] would come check on us, make sure we were okay. She always had gifts for us. If it was Easter, there were chocolate eggs. If it was Christmas, stockings. We were the beneficiaries of them not having kids because they showered us with all their love.”
Knowing this and taking a look at her garden again, you can see it’s not the work of a shut-away curmudgeon. It’s wondrous, inviting, and the right kind of weird.
“Ultimately, she did it for herself and family, first and foremost,” Delgado says of Harper’s Topiary Garden.
Harper’s one request of whomever buys her home may seem like a focus on basic maintenance, about hedges and upkeep and preserving something visually striking. But it’s really about attention. And maybe, too, about legacy. Not hers, per se, but the legacy of community, relationships, art, creativity, possibility, adventure, culture, dedication, and love.
For now, it’s there for anyone to see, and its future is in the hands of whomever comes next.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
The floor is made of glass. Under your feet, you can see the cellar—15-foot ceilings, soft light, and stained white oak walls the color of desert silt.
Tucked behind the wood, inside the doors, and in the ceiling is a highly advanced and very specific network of tech assembled in San Marcos—perfectly calibrating the room for humidity and temperature with vapor barriers, specialized insulation, and LED lights. Along the walls on matte blag pegs lay 1,000-plus bottles of wine—some iconic collector vintages, some with stories, some earmarked for major life moments.
This is a very serious wine home, built by someone whose obsession eventually leads to a call with Chris Noel.
“We have some clients who have been collecting wine since the ’60s and the ’70s, and they have collections of 15,000 or 20,000 or more bottles,” says Noel, owner of Vintage Cellars, the San Marcos–based designer of custom wine vaults for some of the region’s top restaurants and super-collectors. “[For them], collecting wine is similar to Jay Leno collecting cars.”
Courtesy of Vintage Cellars
Before the wheel, there was wine. Fermenting fruit sugars into alcohol was a thing as early as 4100 B.C. (wheel, circa 3500 B.C.), most likely a happy accident. Unsurprisingly, the tipsy breakthrough in juice arts was a huge hit. The challenge was that it was also hugely perishable.
The first efforts to save it from spoil were clay vessels called amphora, often fully or partially buried to create a sun-proof, temperature-stable environment. The terra-cotta pots were pointy-bottomed, which stacked and traveled better, encouraged gas circulation (thus preventing oxidation, the famed wine ruiner), and helped separate sediments.
Once basic preservation was figured out, makers noticed the aging process ushered in a moodier magic. So they engineered structures to tinker with the possibilities of the long haul. Those first wine holes in the dirt evolved into entire catacombs, tombs, quarries, and caves.
Courtesy of Vintage Cellars
Ancient Romans engineered wine storage rooms called fumariums, built facing north to avoid the sun and filled with smoke to speed the aging process (no doubt rapidly aging the cellar workers in the process).
For centuries, specialized wine storage was mostly a commercial venture. Serious wine people would (and still do) outsource their collections to a bonded storage facility or turn to professional cellarers who run giant chilled warehouses of cabernets.
A few major social moments sparked a more serious at-home cellar trend. First, the “Judgment of Paris” in 1976 (California wines famously besting the French in a blind tasting) established US wineries as worthy of collections.
A few years later came the 1982 Bordeaux, one of the most-coveted vintages in history. It was championed by a US lawyer named Robert Parker, whose 100-point scale rating system would quickly become the gold-standard for grading wines, creating a huge boom of wine collectors for the next few decades (wine as an economic investment became a thing).
The US economy also boomed in the ’80s, while France hit a skid. With the dollar trading 6-1 against the franc, US collectors had a rare chance to pick up Grand Crus at serious bargains, which demanded equally serious storage.
Courtesy of Vintage Cellars
Given that framing, 1990 was a fairly great time for Vintage Cellars to get into the game. Noel—who worked his way up at the company and then eventually took over as owner in 2020—and his team work with architects, designers, and builders to create cellars that both fit the space and act as an attraction in multimillion-dollar homes across the region, and at top restaurants like Pamplemousse Grille in Del Mar and Avant Restaurant in Rancho Bernardo Inn. They hide cooling systems in brick-walled enclosures, bend bottle racks around curved walls, create standalone pavilions—engineer structures for cabs.
Their cellars hover between 50 to 70 percent humidity to keep the cork appropriately moist. Air too dry, and a cracked cork will give up the ghost—O2, in excess, turns wine into vinegar. If the air’s too dry, it can shrink the cork, eventually evaporating the wine and creating a low pressure that will pull in destruction. Too humid, and mold contaminates the works.
Light’s a big no-no for wine, too. Incandescent or halogen lights were the norm for cellars 20 years ago, but they emitted heat. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, these bulbs would risk the subject in order to view it. Vintage Cellars adopts LED lighting and, for glass cellars in the sightline of bright windows, mechanized shades that lower during UV exposure times.
Custom circumference-cut cove trays, leather saddles, and pegs stabilize bottles in Vintage Cellars storage areas; movement disturbs the tannins and upsets the aging process. And these cellars are smart, with app-based monitoring, remote temperature monitoring, and eSommelier cellar management. Don’t fret, Siri’s got your Syrah.
The most important decision, however, is deciding when to uncork that special bottle.
“[A lot of times, people] are saving those wines for specific moments in life—maybe a 50th anniversary or when their firstborn turns 21,” says Noel. “That’s how they look at it: as social and also to create memories.”
Pete Peterson has served as high as Editor-in-Chief of an enthusiast media magazine and as low as writer of his own bio… In addition to contributing to San Diego Magazine, Pete authored the YA novel One Tiger One Teen and is working on his second novel. Slightly more info is available at petepetersonauthor.com.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
Growing up, Laika Nur, MD, Scripps Clinic sports medicine specialist, loved watching beach volleyball when the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to her hometown of Chicago. A talented volleyball player herself, she remembers sitting in the stands all day, and once, even got a couple autographs. Years later, Dr. Nur was attending a professional event focused on women’s sports, and the discussion turned to a new professional women’s volleyball league. The general manager and coaching staff for San Diego’s team, the Mojo, happened to be in attendance, and Dr. Nur took the opportunity to ask them if they needed a team doctor. Flash forward to the Mojo’s inaugural 2024 season, when Dr. Nur officially became the team physician. Click here to read more about Dr. Nur and how she incorporates lessons she learned on the court into her practice.
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