For a town of just 12,000 or so, Healdsburg is rife with festivals. Wine festivals. Food festivals. Art festivals. Jazz festivals. Songwriting festivals. Tech festivals. The list grows each year.
And let 2024 be known as the year that the “Design Healdsburg” festival came to town—a two-day exploration of all things design, at a series of 10 events hosted at local studios.
DesignBayArea—the same team behind the nearly 20-year-old San Francisco Design Week, attended by 7,000 design lovers just a few months ago—decided to bring a pared-down version of their format an hour and a half north this week. According to the group’s executive director, Dawn Zidonis, they chose Healdsburg for its “history of honoring the importance of design in regards to city planning and development” and its status as “a mecca among design aficionados as a destination and as a preferred place to open design studios.”
Some of the events on the schedule for Friday, Oct. 4, and Saturday, Oct. 5:
- A talk on “the creativity of place” at SkLO, a new emporium for Czech-style handblown glass at 105A W. North St.
- An open studio at Gallery Lulo, the avant-garde jewelry collective at 303 Center St.
- A fireside chat at the CraftWork co-working space on Center Street, about “how landscape architecture and design contributes to the reciprocal relationships we have with the land”
- Another architecture workshop at Flowers Vineyard & Winery out Westside Road
Festival organizers have even bigger ambitions for next year. “The first inaugural edition of Design Healdsburg has been crafted to be very small and intimate to be reflective of the region,” said Zidonis of DesignBayArea. “For the first year we are only promoting locally, and expect a few hundred attendees. For 2025, we’ll be ramping up not only our regional promotion, but our international outreach.”
