For northern Sonoma County-based artist and art teacher Sandra Novia, designing shop storefronts is an extension of the kind of work she might do in a more traditional art setting. Novia is both a commercial and fine artist — she’s worked as an art teacher at various organizations and school districts, painted murals throughout Sonoma County and more.
Novia has designed storefronts since the 1980s — she’s put together windows for Macy’s in San Francisco, a Bloomingdales in Massachusetts and for smaller shops in the Bay Area — and for more than 20 years, she’s been behind the storefront windows of Favorites Consignment in Healdsburg.
“It’s just a really fun venue — especially because we’ve built a relationship where the (Favorites’ owner) trusts me — it’s a venue for me to have free expression. It’s almost like my own little installation spot,” Novia said.
She first happened across Favorites —a women-owned clothing boutique that celebrated its 31st anniversary in 2021 — in 1995, when a wedding kimono in the shop window caught her eye. From there, she got to know the shop more and eventually settled in as its resident window designer.
“It’s a working window, so we sell product out of it too,” Novia said. She said that she’ll often set clothes aside to suggest as “backup clothes” in case the ones she’s placed in the window are sold. “It’s alive — it’s constantly changing.”
“The point is that when you see it, it excites you and it’s visual from a distance, too,” she said, noting that, if it’s bold enough and big enough, the windows can be seen from across the street.
Now, approximately 276 window designs later, Novia is excited to still be crafting scenes that marry art with the shop’s clothing — finding the inspiration to connect the two can be “the tricky part,” she said.
Novia praised the freedom that she said Favorites owner Louise Gentry gives her, which she said gives her a creative outlet she can count on.
When thinking up windows, she might find inspiration from the clothing itself. One of her first windows for Favorites incorporated kimonos similar to the ones that initially caught her eye. Her inspiration also comes from songs, or art or an upcoming holiday.
She’s filled a window with origami hearts for Valentine’s Day, instructing shop visitors to interact with the piece and write their thoughts about love on pieces of paper. She’s brought in mattresses, sheets and summer clothes as a nod to “Summer Breeze” by Seals & Crofts.
“We’ve done fundraisers, we’ve done political stuff, we’ve done (windows) for the election about when all different groups of people got the right to vote — all kinds of things,” she said.
In October/November 2021, she was inspired by nature. In a November interview, Novia recounted how she went out to harvest branches for an installation involving ravens.
The branches were suspended in the store windows and Novia used chalk pastel to create drawings of ravens that were placed throughout the windows.
“Sometimes I’ll get a clear vision of exactly what I want,” she said, noting that she’ll often see something in nature that inspires her while driving around the county.
For one window, she saw a bunch of pulled grapevines in Geyserville and took some, matching the colors of mustard that grows throughout vineyards in the summer to put on large wood panels behind the vines in the windows.
“I had them at angles the way the rows would be — they were 8-foot-by-4-foot wooden panels that I had painted. Graphically, that one was really fun,” she said.
Novia said that over the years, she’s had people come up to her inquiring about the window designs, keeping an eye as they shift and change. She’s also had people come by who want to buy the art that she’s created and hung in the windows. In large part, she said the windows do their job — they help sell clothes that are placed in them — but they’ve also served as an outlet for community involvement and interest.
When she’s not designing the windows at Favorites — designs change about once a month — Novia teaches art privately, at schools and at local arts organizations throughout Sonoma County.
“I’m spreading art everywhere I can,” Novia said.
