From the exterior, Ligne Roset’s complex in Briord, France, is little to look at, just workaday cement- and-metal factories near the base of the Alps. But once you step inside, the operation bursts into colorful life, with dozens of workers hefting gigantic bolts of fabric, manning robotic sewing machines, and operating cartoonish foam cutters and glue sprayers.

The family-owned company has been making furniture in this location for 38 years. On a recent fall afternoon, the cavernous Briord 1 factory was running full throttle, all the workers focused on turning out French designer Inga Sempé’s Ruché sofa, introduced in 2010 and already iconic. The sofa’s simple form—a slim beech frame draped with a cushiony quilt—belies the effort it takes to produce one: ten-and-a-half hours of labor and up to 11 different craftspeople’s hands.

“When you see a finished object, you can rarely imagine all the work that went in to it,” muses Sempé. “All the sleepless nights for the designer, who stays up thinking about just one curve, all the people who built it.” We tour Ligne Roset’s factory to learn just what it takes to make a Ruché.

1. The Frame
Each Ruché is made on demand, and with 35 fabric and leather choices, hundreds of color options, and four frame variations (natural beech or stained red, blue, or gray), the piece is almost endlessly customizable. The frame starts as raw timber housed underneath a corrugated-metal canopy on Ligne Roset’s 15-acre Briord campus. When an order comes in, workers feed the wood into a high-tech preprogrammed machine that mills it into ten square-sided posts and drills holes where the pieces will connect. A craftsman then assembles the ends of the frame, connecting the pieces using wooden pegs and glue. Next, it’s passed along to a technician in a ventilator mask who sprays the wood with a transparent stain or varnish. Once dry, the frame components, seat, and steel- springed backrest are joined with glue and pegs, and Velcro and strips of zippers are stapled to the places where the quilted cover will eventually attach.

2. The Foam
In one corner of the 382,000-square-foot factory, stacks of colorful, spongy foam await their fates, each hue indicating a different density and use. After quick work on the computerized foam cutter, the three pieces of foam that will eventually comprise the backrest travel on a wheeled trolley to the glue booth, a white-walled space resembling a walk-in industrial fridge. A technician sprays a sheet of pliable purple memory foam with a water-based adhesive and then carefully folds it over the other two foam layers and a steel spring grill to complete the backrest. All these cushiony layers will be invisible beneath the quilted cover but will immensely improve the sofa’s comfort.

3. The Cover
Ligne Roset is fanatic about fabric quality. Before a bolt is used, workers unroll it completely and inspect it carefully for color variation, nubs and pulls, and other defects. If the quality is suitable, an automated 17-foot-long Gerber Cutter cuts the fabric according to the pattern. The colorful cutouts are piled one stack per sofa and labeled with the future owners’ names and hometowns before they are wheeled to the sewing area, where they meet up with thin sheets of precut batting. Seamstresses layer the fabric and batting and attach them to a frame that temporarily holds the pieces together. The frame is then inserted into a gigantic preprogrammed sewing machine that quilts the surface with the “broken grid” of lines that Sempé devised to create the cover’s signature texture. It takes an hour and a half for the machine to make its 2,008 stitches, with cold air constantly blowing on the needle to prevent broken threads caused by friction and overheating. Once the quilting is complete, the women remove the cover from the frame, speedily snip off loose threads with scissors, and use an electric cutter to trim it to its final shape. Other sewers then stitch zippers on to the cover’s edges to enable it to attach securely to the wooden sofa frame.

4. The Final Assembly
The physically taxing job of assembling the final product is most frequently handled by men in the factory, but Laurence is a nimble, notable exception. After assembling the sofa and fluffing the cover she readies it for shipping and boxes it up.

“I love to see the different parts from the factory all united at the end,” says Laurence, a small, muscular, ponytailed woman who has the glory job of transforming the various pieces into a finished Ruché, all in about 15 minutes. She starts by carefully arranging a final sheet of foam inside the cover, ensuring it lies flat. Then she drapes the piece over the frame, aligns the seams, attaches the corners and edges with the zippers and Velcro, and then firmly and deliberately places well-calibrated karate chops to the corners. If she needs to, she can consult her quality-control photo, a glamour shot of one single perfect Ruché. After a few additional adjustments, which include hitting the cover with both hands outstretched to “fluff” it, this particular Ruché is ready to ship to Germany. “It’s not an easy model to make,” Laurence says proudly, “but it’s such an interesting one.”

Click here for an extended look at designer Inga Sempe’s creative process.

“The computer is a tool; I can’t do without it,” says Förster. “But the nice thing about making models is that in the process of doing, I’m more open to mistakes—maybe I put the tape in a way that I don’t intend, but it shows a new possibility. In a computer everything is perfect. When I make models, it’s intuitive and rough: I take a flat piece of paper, I cut it, I tape it. It’s very quick. I find it very refreshing.”

Read more and watch slideshow here.

Still, this is no primitive lean-to. There’s electricity, hot water, and a kitchen—not to mention iPads, Internet, and a clawfoot tub. By day, the couple trims trees and chops firewood. At night, they sit around a campfire and eat Japanese curry, listen to Phish, and balance their laptops on their knees. This is what a modern back-to-the-land effort looks like.

Read more and watch slideshow here.

Thomas Phifer is one of the most subdued architects you’ll ever meet. Sitting in his all-white New York office in a navy suit, reclining diagonally in a straight-backed chair, he speaks in a low and measured tone. When he’s being pensive—–which is most of the time—–he closes his eyes as he talks and bobs his hand gently in front of him like a conductor, as if coaxing out words. To hear him better, I lean in, block out the blaring car horns outside. In this way, he is like his architecture: exquisitely quiet, subtle, and absorbing.

Phifer has been practicing architecture for 34 years, as a partner at Richard Meier’s office from 1986 to 1996, and as founding principal of his firm, Thomas Phifer and Partners, since 1996. He designs beautiful buildings—–minimalist steel-and-glass houses, a daylit museum—–but his architecture is about much more than eye candy. “We work a lot with nature, trying to bring people more in touch with their environment in a subliminal way,” he says, in a subtle South Carolina twang (he grew up in Columbia and went to architecture school at Clemson University). “Our buildings want to be helping hands, bringing people closer to understanding the sun, and light, and the change of seasons. For far too long, buildings have been fortresses, cutting people off from nature.”

His masterwork to date—though he’s far too humble and cool-headed to call it that—may well be the Fishers Island House, a second home he designed recently for Tom Armstrong, the director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his wife, Bunty. Set on an island off the coast of Connecticut and surrounded by gardens, the house embodies Phifer’s design sensibility. The pavilionlike building sits lightly in the landscape, both aesthetically (with its wraparound glass facade and minimal interior walls, the place is literally see-through) and ecologically, thanks to geothermal heating and natural ventilation. An aluminum-and-steel-rod trellis encircles the house at roof height, modulating natural light that washes in through the 12-foot-high glass walls.

During the design process, Armstrong stopped by the office weekly to check on the house and discuss the latest drawings. That could be an architect’s nightmare, but Phifer embraced the opportunity to relate so closely with a client. “The closer the collaboration, the better,” he says. “To hear the voice of the person who will inhabit a place and see it come alive in the built work is for me what architecture is all about.” While the house was still on paper, Phifer’s office made Armstrong miniature, to-scale models of both the interior walls and the couple’s collection of 20th-century abstract American paintings, so he could figure out the best way to display his art. “He gave me this incredible toy,” recalls Armstrong. “With most architects, it’s ‘Give me the program and I’ll give you the design.’ But Tom really worked with me. He’s not a screamer or a monster ego. But when he’s on the right track, he proceeds with great strength and brings you along.”

Phifer traces his evolution as an architect back to 1976, when at age 22 he took his first trip to Europe (and first flight anywhere). He stepped off the plane and his mind was promptly blown. “Oh my god, this is outrageous, this is incredible,” he recalls thinking. “I was kind of skipping along in life, and then I went to Europe and my world opened up. Seeing the work of James Stirling in London, Aalto in Finland, Gaudí in Spain, the ruins in Rome—it was just an outrageous experience.” Later, while managing projects in Paris, Basel, and Barcelona for Meier’s office, Phifer observed and internalized the priorities that shaped European design—–such as access to natural ventilation and daylighting—–but that were largely neglected in American architecture at the time. “In countries like the Netherlands it’s literally against the law to put people away from a window,” he recalls now. “It’s a human right to have contact with nature. In America that wasn’t really a concern. It’s just a completely different idea about how to make a building.”

In 1995, Phifer won the prestigious Rome Prize and took a leave of absence from Meier’s office to spend eight months in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Dedicating himself to “studying daylight,” he visited the Pantheon almost every day, rain or shine. “It’s really a metaphysical experience to go in and understand what that building does and how that building represents eternal light,” he raves. “It’s the magic of the oculus, like everyone says. It was built for the ages. You can’t talk about that kind of permanence very easily in the archi-tecture that we make today.” When Phifer returned from Rome he decided to start his own firm, working, at first, out of his living room. His firm is now in west SoHo, with a staff of 25 working collaboratively around a hundred-foot-long table.

His first major commission was the Taghkanic House in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, a collaboration with his mentor, the legendary modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley, then age 87. “I’d never designed a house in the landscape before,” Phifer says. “We talked about how to embed architecture in the land, how to choreograph the arrival, how to allow buildings to deal with daylight and the land”—–guiding principles that continue to shape Phifer’s designs. The resulting house is a white-painted steel-and-glass box that rests on a hill; the rest of the structure is sunk into the earth, with a shaded glass face open to light and views. Since then, he’s designed airy and luminous houses and office buildings across the country, a United States courthouse in Salt Lake City, a student center for Rice University, and, most recently, the new North Carolina Museum of Art, an open-plan 120,000-square-foot museum where, as in the Fishers Island House, controlled daylighting illuminates the art and transparent walls reveal gardens and reflecting pools just outside. His firm also won an international competition to design a new streetlight for New York City, a taskhe found more difficult than conceiving a building. “It was so technically challenging,” he says of their design, which employs an energy-efficient LED bulb. “To my knowledge, it was one of the first designs for an LED streetlight, so we really had to push the technology.”

By all measures, Phifer’s firm is flourishing. But Phifer shrugs off any applause. “You have to practice for so, so, so many years before you even get a glimpse of the right way to do a building,” he demurs. “The more you see—–the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Museum that Lou Kahn did—–and the older you get, the more humble you get, because you begin to understand how those buildings are true masterpieces. Architecture is extremely difficult to make at that level.”

When I point out that not all architects get humbler with age, he raises his eyebrows and leans forward insistently. “Just one trip to the Kimbell and you feel like you’ll never do a building that’s even close to that. The building is completely timeless. The natural light is just breathless. It’s incredibly simple and powerful. When you’re a young architect, you look at it and you say, yeah, that’s beautiful. But when you get older you really begin to appreciate what a masterpiece is.

“More and more I’m thinking about life span,” he continues. “A lot of work we’re trying to make more permanent, making simpler and simpler forms. We’re into very quiet architecture.” Prodding him to think big, I ask him to name his dream project. “Another museum,” he says evenly. “Another house.”

Svetlin and Dessi were clearly up for something innovative and exciting,” says Schoenenberger, explaining why his firm took on the relatively small-scale, $300-per-square-foot renovation project. Schoenenberger and Kolatan’s boldest moves include an eye-catching sculptural Corian wall above the bed, whose curves create an arresting and ever-changing play of light and shadow.

To contain clutter and create a sense of spaciousness and visual continuity, the architects installed a laminate storage wall that stretches and curves from the entranceway all the way to the boys’ room. The floor-to-ceiling cabinets contain almost all the family’s possessions, from clothing and shoes to books and bedding.

The unit seamlessly transforms into a window ledge (hiding a heater) and a built-in bench. On the opposite side of the hallway, the storage wall bumps out to accommodate the television and entertainment system and gains some hidden extra space from the former lot-line window niches.

“We realize the space has limitations,” says Krastev. “Maybe when the kids get to be ten or 12 years old, we’ll have to move. But we can easily spend another five years here. On a day-to-day basis we’re very comfortable. We don’t have endless means or endless space, but our quality of life is very high.”

The Dong people sing love songs, drinking songs, and work songs; “gate-barring songs” to greet visitors while assessing their intentions; and Grand Songs, epic historical ballads passed down orally from song masters to young disciples. In other respects as well, the people of Dimen, one of 15 Dong villages in Guizhou province, still practice a way of life that dates back to the 13th century. They build their houses and bridges with wooden pegs and posts. They use ancient, integrated farming methods, raising rice and carp together in thousands of terraced ponds cut into the mountainside. The women weave and dye their own cloth, including a glossy black fabric they buff with boiled cow skin and egg whites.

But Dimen isn’t completely stopped in time. Its tiny commercial center consists of a bus station, an elementary school, a grocery store—and a cell phone shop. And even though Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China, televisions, washing machines, and other trappings of modern life increasingly crop up in Dong households, largely because the government offers subsidies on surplus consumer goods.

China is rocketing into the future—lacing itself up with superhighways, swallowing rural towns, and spitting out gleaming cities. In Dimen, nearly half of the village’s 2,340 residents work in nearby towns and cities, forgoing the rice fields for better-paying jobs in construction and manufacturing. But in the past decade, privately administered conservation projects have encouraged the people of Dimen to reestablish a self-sustaining local economy and, even while engaging with the outside world, preserve many of their traditional ways. The Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop, founded by Hong Kong professor and entrepreneur Wai Kit Lee, strives to bolster indigenous Dong culture without turning Dimen into a tourist trap that puts villagers on display.

The Research Workshop collaborated with residents to rebuild the Dimen drum tower, which burned down in 2006. The restoration of this symbol of village unity set the precedent of a rural community empowered to safeguard its heritage.

One of the Grand Songs of the Dong, which takes more than an hour to sing, is titled “Village Elder Tang Gong.” According to local legend, Tang founded Dimen 800 years ago. This traditional red pagoda was built as a memorial to him and restored in the 1980s.

The Dong people of Dimen live much the way their ancestors did. But a few modern amenities have appeared in recent years, as in the home of Niangqian Wu and her husband, a rice farmer and carpenter who helped construct the Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop. They live in a house built into a hillside, its front half hanging precariously over the slope. In the living room, which is heated by a coal fire, the ceiling is low and the thin wooden walls are plastered with peeling sheets of newspaper. Asked how her life has changed over the past decade, Wu nods in the direction of the single bare lightbulb overhead. “Better wiring, piped water, better roads,” she says through a translator. “Fire hydrants.” Indoor plumbing is now standard.

A glossy white refrigerator sits in the corner of the room. It is empty, its interior still coated with protective plastic film and the manufacturer’s labels. In the dim light it glows like an alien. “She says the fridge is for decoration, to make them look like a modern family,” the translator says. “On TV, they see that city people have refrigerators. But she says her family has no use for it. When it is time to eat, they kill chickens. They catch fish. They pick vegetables from their garden.” Wu giggles, covering her mouth. “She thinks it’s very funny,” explains the translator, “that the fridge is empty.”

Distinguished by its stone arches and tiered tiled roofs, a covered “flower bridge” is an architectural highlight of most Dong villages. It provides shelter from the rain and a year- round place to rest, socialize, and play games.

A narrow pebbly river bisects Dimen’s dense patchwork of wooden houses. Spanning the water stand five exuberantly ornamented “flower bridges,” also known as “wind-and-rain bridges” for their utility in a storm. Just outside the village, terraced rice paddies and fields of vegetables and tea plants provide residents with their main livelihood and sources of food.

In the spring of 2010, Wai Kit Lee and fellow researcher Leon Ren helped launch an experimental pilot project, inspired by the Community Supported Agriculture movement. They paired approximately 150 rice-farming families in Dimen with families in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. The city dwellers pay the farmers directly, and fairly, for their organic rice. The hope, Ren explains, is to foster personal connections and spark “interactive tourism and cultural exchange.” He envisions urban families visting Dimen to see where their rice comes from, getting to know the farmers, and learning more about ethnic-minority culture and rural life.

SIDEBAR: Lifestyles in the Balance

In 2003, Wai Kit Lee arrived in Guizhou with a team of musicologists. A Hong Kong businessman, publisher, and professor of ethnic-minority culture at universities in Beijing and Guiyang, Lee planned to record the music of the Dong, Miao, Yao, and Shui people and release it on a series of CDs. But when he witnessed the penetration of commercial activities in the region and saw villagers leaving their homes to work in nearby factories and cities, he took on a considerably larger project. With his own money, he funded the Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop, which opened on the eastern outskirts of Dimen in 2005. Its goals include the documentation of ethnic music, crafts, and rituals, and the development of locally controlled economic projects that improve the quality of life without throwing the culture out of balance.

Resembling a rambling wooden tree house, the workshop’s complex was built using traditional Dong techniques, without a formal blueprint or a single nail. The village feng shui master sacrificed a chicken to ensure that construction proceeded smoothly. Gently rising staircases connect the center to the lodge, which accommodates up to 60 visiting scholars and researchers.

The research center aims to reverse a trend that has taken hold in rural China: Business interests lease entire century-old villages and turn them into ethnic-minority “theme parks.” They charge admission fees for daily shows of formerly sacred rituals. Villagers get paid nominal amounts to perform them and to host tourists in their “traditional-looking” homes. “They use heritage to develop a brand and incite tourism, to attract eyeballs and money,” says Lee. “People who go to those theme parks are curious about ‘exotic’ lifestyles, but they do not visit them with the intention to understand more about the culture.” Guesthouses and souvenir shops might thrive, but eventually, he says, “the soul of the town is gone, only the skeleton remains.”

“We’re trying to find opportunities for the Dong to improve their livelihood without completely altering their way of life,” Lee explains. “I want to show that a village can be rich in other ways—in community, in self-reliance, in lack of anxiety.”

For more images of Dimen, see here.

Keener: When we first came to Phoenix, we realized: People move here for the “weather,” but you drive around and you see that everyone is either outside squinting or inside with their shades drawn tight. So we wanted to create a house that was still connected to the outside.

Atherton: The house consists of three rooms: a bedroom on either end of the house and a living room in the middle. Each room faces a different direction, and each receives light in a different way. The west gets extreme sun exposure in Arizona, so we don’t have any openings on that side, except for the front door. The kitchen, laundry, and two bathrooms run along that wall and they are very compact, like in a ship or an RV. The hallway is a clear long path that connects everything, with a wall of translucent glass on one side and black plywood cabinets on the other.

Keener: Because of practical and budgetary reasons, we didn’t have the luxury of using crazy materials. Concrete block has been a part of building in the desert for a long time. The screen that wraps three sides of the house is just a standard thing you see everywhere down here—–generally used to shade parking lots and kids’ playgrounds. The floor is concrete. The walls are drywall. Our interest was in using standard things on a relatively unremarkable site and creating something that was more than the sum of its parts.

Atherton: The design process was fairly rigorous and very slow. We were the clients and the builders and the designers, so we were really our own worst enemies. Instead of just going to Home Depot and buying everything, we tried to make as many things as we could by hand, so that they would agree with the rest of the house. We wanted to accomplish as much as we could with just a few materials.

Keener: Basically the only things in the house that we purchased were the plumbing fixtures and the appliances. We made all the cabinets—–in the bathroom, kitchen, storage closets, and hallways—–ourselves, out of plywood that we dyed black. For a while the sinks and tubs were going to be concrete. But it never felt right. In the end we made them by hand, out of marine-grade plywood and marine epoxy resin.

Atherton: One of the challenges we faced was that at some point, the design started to reject ideas.

Keener: It was important that the rooms be pure spaces. The curved walls are just there to capture the light conditions from the windows. We’ve been very meticulous about locating distractions—–like closets or light switches—–in the hallway. We wanted to make something quiet enough to receive what’s going on outside. It helps that we don’t carry a lot of furniture with us. Before we moved into the house we lost our lease on a rental and shared a five-by-ten storage unit. It wasn’t even full; it was like half full. People come in and they say, “Whoa, art would look so good on these walls.” But I’ve never felt like this house is missing anything.

Atherton: There are some uncon-ventional aspects to the house, but we’re also using it as an architecture studio, and a pavilion, and a warehouse. If we’re interested in something, we can bring it in and experiment with it. When we were working on an art installation, we had two 300-pound blocks of ice in a tub in the middle of the room. At one point there were 800 yards of fabric piled up. We have a dog, and when we had all that fabric lying around, he loved it, he was like “Oh my god, it’s furniture.” And then it was gone.

Atherton: Our friends know that this house lacks a certain amount of comfort, but everyone adapts to what it does have. When people come over to eat, we usually sit on the floor—–we keep it really clean—–or outside. We’ve all adapted to what it means to not have a dining table. We don’t have a couch. It can be a bit of a problem. Like when we have our girlfriends over it’s hard to make them just sit on the floor or on a chair. And it’s very presumptuous to have the bed as the main piece of furniture in the house. One of the nice things about having a girlfriend is, she has a couch at home.

Keener: The house isn’t static. A photographer friend uses the place for fashion shoots. The other weekend we had 40 people in the living room listening to a classical guitar, bass, and flute trio. One night this woman played a solo piece on the violin in the dark, and the moonlight was bright enough to cast shadows on the screen from the oleander outside. It was so beautiful.

We have been fairly open with sharing the house with folks and that’s been really rewarding. It always surprises me with how grateful they are and how pleased they are with the experience that they have here. I think that people appreciate being in something so clear and consistent. They use words like “peaceful” and “Eastern” and “meditative” and “calm” to describe the space.

Atherton: There are lots of examples in history where an architect builds a home, and from that home, his ideas develop, and he becomes more fully realized as an architect. It doesn’t necessarily make the best or easiest home. But it does set a trajectory for future projects. We were both interested in building something that we could learn from.

Inspired by the Seinfeld episode where Kramer rescues a Merv Griffin Show set from the trash and sets it up in his living room, Rubin built a ’70s-style talk-show set in the back of the restaurant, aiming to “use waffles to lure people into public storytelling.”A dedicated host—sometimes one of Rubin’s students, sometimes a community member—sits at a desk on a raised stage and engages the diverse cafe clientele in impromptu and completely unpredictable conversations that range, as Rubin puts it, “from Lady Gaga to conspiracy theories to unem-ployment to ghosts.” The talkshow “episodes” are streamed live online, and the most compelling ones are archived.

To his delight, locals embraced the unusual project. “Food creates a space of comfort for people,” Rubin says. “People who wouldn’t normally go into a theater would get up and perform. It allowed the possibility of unexpected interactions to take place.”

Rubin’s experiment continues to evolve. His own cravings for ethnic food in chipped ham-inclined Pittsburgh inspired the Conflict Kitchen, his latest collaboration with fellow artists Don Peña and Dawn Weleski. The goal, again, is to use food as a way to get people talking—in this case, about politics. The takeout window, adjacent to the Waffle Shop, sells street food exclusively from countries the United States is in conflict with, spotlighting a different country, dish, and storefront facade every four months. The kitchen’s first iteration served Iranian kubideh sandwiches (spiced beef, basil, onion, and mint rolled in flat barbari bread and sprinkled with sumac)wrapped in paper printed with interviews with members of the local Persian community.

Recently, the kitchen’s focus turned to Afghani cuisine. Though the flavors may change, the goals for both shops are the same: to engage the community by tempting their palates.

1. Outerlands

The menu at this rustic cafe from the husband-and-wife team of David Muller and Lana Porcello is ever-changing; a recent visit turned up whole baked trout with walnut gremolata. But there’s always soup and Muller’s homemade levain bread. 4001 Judah Street; (415) 661-6140; outerlandssf.com.

2. Polly Ann Ice Cream

If you can’t decide which of the 48 daily flavors to choose, go for green tea, everyone’s favorite, or spin the wheel of destiny and leave it to fate. For the intrepid, there’s Durian, a stinky-but-sweet flavor stored in the back. 3138 Noriega Street; (415) 664-2472.

3. Tuesday Tattoo

With its calm environment and friendly staff, this is an unintimidating place to get inked in San Francisco. Jesse Tuesday (right), Sam McWilliams and Hannah Wednesday specialize in intricate custom designs; even if you’re not in the market for body art, their portfolios — open on the front counter — are worth a browse. 4025 Judah Street; (415) 242-6028; jessetuesday.com.

4. Trouble Coffee Company

The magic words at this funky coffee shop, sheathed in reclaimed wood, are ”build your own damn house.” Say it to the barista and he’ll hand over a cup of coffee, a thick slice of cinnamon toast and a Thai coconut, all for $8. 4033 Judah Street; (415) 690-9119; troublecoffee.com.

5. Carville Annex

This tiny gallery — the space is basically a hallway leading to a staircase — has a lofty mission: to spotlight emerging talent and involve the viewer in the process. In January it’ll feature inhabitable sculptures by the local artist Llewelynn Fletcher. 4037 Judah Street; carvilleannex.com; by appointment only.

6. Woodshop

Four creative young artisan-designers (all surfers) share this studio with a by-appointment shop in the front where they sell their work: handmade heirloom-quality surfboards, typography-driven graphic art, and custom wooden furniture like a walnut slab table with cast bronze legs. 3725 Noriega Street; (415) 240-5504; woodshopsf.com.

7. General Store

Mason St. Peter, an architect, and Serena Mitnik-Miller, an artist and designer, opened this shop last December, envisioning a place with a little of everything. Most of the items are made locally, including Botany Factory terrariums and Tellason denim. 4035 Judah Street; (415) 682-0600; visitgeneralstore.com.

8. Mollusk Surf Shop

This quintessential California surf shop has been a community anchor since it opened in 2005, selling silk-screened T-shirts, hoodies and hand-printed posters along with a plethora of surf gear and boards. There’s also an art gallery and a treehouse installation made from recycled wood by the artist Jay Nelson. 4500 Irving Street; (415) 564-6300; mollusksurfshop.com.