Chosen Places: Northern California Coast
Hanneke Lourens takes us to the coast.
When I was a living in LA, riding my bike for hundreds of miles a week, I met a cool girl with a cool accent and a cool life while on a (you guessed it) cool ride on the coast, and I have been quietly ogling her life from the sidelines for nearly a decade. Hanneke Lourens and her partner Robin are our friends from afar, and we are constantly wondering when we can make the 20-odd hour drive to see them again on the northern California coastline.
Lucky us, Hanneke agreed to show us around virtually.
Hanneke, take us to the coast.
Where have you lived so far?
I grew up in a town called Swellendam in South Africa and mostly lived there until I was 18, with a small stint in the suburbs of Cape Town during primary school. According to Wikipedia Swellendam has 17,537 inhabitants, so it’s pretty small but certainly not tiny. It’s a beautiful town that sits in the shadows of a stunning mountain, which unsurprisingly I did not appreciate while growing up there.
After I finished high school, I spent about 8 years bouncing back and forth between South Africa and random parts of the world, doing random jobs. These included: working in restaurants in Dubai, photographing people snorkeling and scuba diving in the Cayman Islands, and back to restaurant work in England.
At 26 I moved from South Africa to England for what I thought would be a couple of years to study fashion design [before heading back to South Africa]. Shockingly it's now 14 years later and I still haven’t moved back home. I met my husband in London and in 2015 we moved to Los Angeles together. After a year and a half of living a big life in the big city, my husband was let go from his fancy job. Visa complications meant that we weren’t allowed to work for a while, so we made the decision to move out of LA—the city is no place for a zero-income household. We put all of our belongings into a storage unit, moved into a 14 foot travel trailer and… just sort of wandered around Southern California for a while. The course of our life really changed at this point and eventually I decided to pursue a different career path, which brought us up to the Mendocino Coast in Northern California.
How did you end up where you currently are? What drew you to this place initially?
We made the move up here so I could attend a 2 year intensive woodworking program at The Krenov School. After the course finished, we decided to stay—or maybe Covid decided for us—and I now work as a furniture designer and maker in the same town.
What’s a small, everyday joy that comes from being there?
I love how close we are to nature here and how close nature gets to us. We live on a 3 acre property just a few miles out of town, surrounded by majestic redwood trees. There’s a small window in our kitchen, right by the kettle which is the first thing I’m drawn to in the morning. More often than not, especially in the spring and summer, I see rabbits or deer hanging out in our yard through that little window. It’s such a lovely way to start the day.
In what moments does this place really feel like home?
This is the longest I’ve ever lived in one location in my adult life, but to be honest, I still feel a bit weird about calling it home. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’m betraying South Africa, or maybe as a person who’s lived in many different places, ‘home’ is kind of complicated. A piece of my heart has always been in South Africa and the plan is to eventually move back there in the (probably distant) future.
Which brings me to the dusty patch of desert land we bought in the Karoo region of South Africa last year. For a few years we were searching for a place we could hopefully call home one day. We eventually found an 85 acre property, about half of it planted with olive trees, just outside the town of Prince Albert.
Like Kelton and Ben when they were searching for their right fit, we also had a bit of a wish list of what we hoped to find. I wasn’t organised enough to write it down at the time, but it was fun to retroactively make the list:
We were hoping to find a bigger piece of land that had the potential to be developed in different ways depending on what the future holds. Tick.
We didn’t want to be too far out of town as we thought this might make building a community hard. Seeing that our little farm borders the town, I think we ticked this box too.
Ideally we wanted to be close to a small town with character and creativity. This Wall Street Journal article says we made the right choice.
We wanted to be remote but not too remote. To us, about 2 hours from the nearest airport and 4 hours from Cape Town, felt close enough to visit and to be visited.
Close to nature. Our patch of dust has hares, small antelope and the occasional aardvark roaming around. I’m hoping to one day recreate the ritual of creature-watching while drinking my morning tea.
It was important to us to live in a place where people speak different languages and have diverse cultures. I think we did pretty good on that front too.
And lastly, it obviously needed to be within our budget.
The one area where we ‘failed’ miserably was finding a property that had a livable house on it. Although we’ll have to build a dwelling before we can move to the farm, to us this issue seemed like an easier fix than the other things on the list above. So we just went for it.
Has this place changed how you see yourself or affected your priorities? Do you feel different — mentally, emotionally, physically — since moving there?
Moving out of LA and up to Northern California—with an interlude in a trailer in the desert—definitely changed my outlook on life in a big way. In the before times, I followed a more conventional path, not really questioning the boxes I thought needed ticking along the way. But as I got pushed out of my comfort zone and as life became more unpredictable, I started focusing more on what I wanted my ideal day to look like. A friend of mine calls it ‘designing your life.’
Living on this 3 acre property also introduced me to a lot of chores that weren't part of my life in the city. I mow the lawn, stack firewood, grow vegetables, clean the gutters, trim the trees and make compost, most of which I actually enjoy. I’m not sure the olive farm in South Africa would have happened without this very important stepping stone in the Northern Californian redwoods and for that I am very grateful.
How long do you see yourself staying in this place?
I really have no idea. Probably anywhere between 4 and 40 years. Life is so unpredictable that it feels like anything can happen at any time. Which is very exciting and somewhat scary too!
What is community like there, and how do you see yourself as part of it?
I feel like building a community is like growing a garden: it constantly needs weeding, watering and tending. I’m an introverted extrovert (or is it the other way around?) so working in this metaphorical garden can sometimes be a little exhausting. I love being on my own, but know it’s good for me to be around people. My easiest way of creating community is with people who do the same activities as me—I’m a do’er so I love doing things with people. I’ve built a sweet little community here around hiking, riding bicycles, woodworking and going on adventures.
Looking for more Hanneke on the internet?
Hanneke Lourens is a South African furniture designer and maker, living in the Northern Californian redwoods. You can connect with her on Instagram here or subscribe to her sometimes monthly newsletter where she highlights other African creatives.
You can find the Chosen Places series here. Subscribe to get every edition, every time.
Do you know someone who lives someplace magical? Who lives in a strange house or moved to a far flung place? Someone who looked for refuge when looking for a home and found it? Someone who found home right where they started?
love the Chosen Places series!
In 2014, I participated in a bike race across South Africa. Swartberg Pass and the Karoo were such incredibly beautiful places to pedal through. Unreal, almost. I can understand why you're returning. http://www.jilloutside.com/2014/07/race-across-south-africa-part-nine.html