Here at cityhome we are by nature, creators of connection. We can’t help but share the things we love with the clients and community members who walk through our door with a willing ear and an open heart. In our quest to spread the love (and knowledge), we’ve paired up with some of our favorite local makers to host a variety of workshops that have made Saturdays at cityhome such a sacred place to be.
If you’ve been here before you know that we are a space that engages all of the senses. The music is thoughtfully curated, we love a dimmer switch, and it always smells good (or at least we’re told). It’s no coincidence that local perfumer and scent designer Dimitri Allouch of fragrance studio HEXEH, has been a friend to and collaborator with the COLLECTIVE for years. These days you can find him at cityhome leading an immersive perfumery workshop on select Saturdays throughout each month.
As Dimitri describes it, “You are invited to slow down, to breathe, and rediscover your sense of smell, the instinctive, emotional sense we often overlook. You’ll be guided through the foundations of perfumery: where it comes from, how fragrances are built, and how raw materials come together to create character and emotion.”
The class is equal parts science and art.
A balance of beauty and biochemistry. Each group is small, creating an intimate, focused experience for everyone – your own personal scent cohort. And at the end of the day you go home with a custom scent that you’ve created from start to finish.
The reason this workshop is so rich isn’t a fluke.
It’s quite literally built into the very fabric of who Dimitri is. He grew up near the city of Grasse, in the south of France. The city itself may be small, but it’s a giant in the world of fragrance, the historical center of high perfumery. For Dimitri, scent is akin to home. He navigates olfactory profiles with intimate precision. He builds a landscape through scent and then invites you in to explore it with him.
“Each workshop reflects an ongoing professional practice rooted in material knowledge and a deep respect for scent as a design medium. Teaching is approached not as instruction alone, but as the sharing of a way of seeing — and smelling — the world.”
I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing this first hand. The connection is real. The conversation is potent. And Dimitri is always the last one to leave, but only after answering every question. Folks linger. And we love a good linger! You know the feeling, right? The party is technically over but you’re not quite ready to leave yet. These are some of my favorite moments. When I’m reminded of the connective tissue that is learning something new, together.
saturday | APRIL 11TH & April 25th 10:00AM-3:00PM | 641 E SOUTH TEMPLE | CITYHOMEcollective
For more information including additional upcoming dates and pricing, or to register for the workshop text or call 801.718.5555
Kim Fearick is a lover of all things wild and alive. She lives in a constant state of wonder and exploration that manifests as meandering through the desert, plunging her hands into the soil, and turning over the rocks of her inner landscape. Her curious nature has led her to build a life around uncovering the stories that lie within a person, a place, or an object. Kim lives by the rules of radical love, and her core intention here at cityhome is to create a space that feels welcoming to anyone who walks through the door, a place that you can find something to connect with, even if it’s just the human standing behind the counter. As both a maker herself, and a seller of handmade goods, Kim is able to provide a high level of intuitive customer service that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional retail experience. She believes that a well run shop serves as a hub for the community at large, and provides a safe place for folks to get curious about how they’re building and nurturing home for themselves and others.
You could be living anywhere, really. Why SLC? I originally came out here straight out of high school, my older brother was here so I figured it would be a good jumping off point. Since then I’ve left and come back to SLC a handful of times over the course of the last 20+ years, so I’ve thought about this question a lot. I love the connection and access to nature that I have here. There is something so sacred in this land. I feel so fortunate to live in a place with such topographical diversity. I am most at home and at peace when I’m in the deserts of central and southern Utah. I’ve moved just a state away thinking that would be close enough, and I truly felt like I’d left a piece of myself behind, so I decided to come back to her. It’s such a privilege to get to live within a 4ish hour drive of some of my favorite places on Earth. I’ve also found such a strong community here that I just can’t imagine trying to rebuild anywhere else, at least at this moment in time. I guess the common denominator is that I’ve felt the most heart here in Utah than anywhere else I’ve been to.
Do you remember when home first started mattering to you? I think I’ve always connected deeply with the idea of “home”, although maybe I wouldn’t have always recognized it as such. As a kid I always wanted to belong, to feel a part of something. And I looked for it in different things. People, places, animals, etc…. I always felt at home in nature, I grew up on the East Coast so for a long time the ocean was home. When I moved out west I felt immediately at home in the mountains, and then the desert. I also have a deep connection to animals, so my pets have often felt like home. I will say that finding home within myself is something I’ve been working on for a lot of years, and lately I feel like I’ve been able to create a safe place internally that I can rely on wherever I may find myself, physically.
Favorite read/watch: Some of my favorite reads are ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘When Women Were Birds’ by Terry Tempest Williams and ‘All About Love’ by bell hooks. I love to read things that light my brain up with imagery and feel simultaneously like poetry and nature with a dash of resistance and revolutionary thinking.
In terms of what to watch, I’m currently stuck on Hamnet, so I have to list that. ‘Fire of Love’ is a documentary I’ve watched in the last year or so and absolutely loved. And I always go back to some of my favorite late 80’s, early 90’s favorites like True Romance, Beetlejuice and The Professional.
Is there a promise that you’d like to make to your clients? For me the purpose of a well functioning shop is to serve as a hub for community connection. Whether that’s introducing someone to a local maker or product, or just providing a space that they can pop into and find a familiar face. Everything else tends to fall into place if you can achieve that. So I’d like my promise to clients, customers and community to be that when you’re here I’ll do everything that I can to make you feel like you’re home, like you have a place that you belong.
What don’t you believe any more? What do you believe now? What is something you’ve come to believe? Wow, wow, wow do I love this question…also whoa, that’s so deep!
I no longer believe that there is a “right way” to live. I think for a long time I bought into the idea that there was a formulaic way that we were supposed to move through life in order to be “successful”. That there was a timeline I was meant to follow, or predestined boxes to check that signified that I was on the right track. Following that way of thinking led me into dark places, and I’m so glad I touched those places so that I could really experience how wrong that felt in my body.
I believe now that we are all exactly where we’re supposed to be, and that we have everything we need inside of us. That sounds so simple and maybe reductive, and it’s been one of the hardest things for me to truly accept and to trust. The idea that this present moment is such a gift. Whether we’re struggling to pull ourselves through it or we’re dancing into each day, that is the right answer. That is where we’re meant to be. Trying to find a little bit of peace and understanding in the ever-changing ugly and beautiful of each day.
I’ve come to believe that we are all just animals trying to find something to connect to. Someway to feel loved. The closer I connect to that understanding, the higher capacity I have to love and be loved. When that feels hard or far away I like to imagine each person (including myself) as their 6 year old self. What does that little human need? How would we play together? If I can move from there I can often find empathy in places that can seem hopeless.
Guess what guys and gals?
Curriculum and cityhome are getting back together again for a day of curated-with-care goods and collectibles. We’ve been collaborating with Curriculum since the beginning of time. (JK, just since we helped them with their original 9th and 9th location.) Save the date. The Shop will be popping up Thursday, December 11th, from 2:00-8:00pm in Curriculum’s lot. Join us for a sweet evening. Come by and shop for some skull soaps, handmade ceramics, other goods and to see some friends. That’s us, we’re the friends.
Thursday, December 11th | 2:00-8:00pm | Curriculum 865 E 900 S
Name: Chelsea Petrich
Location: Sugarhouse, UT
Medium: Soaps & Essential Oils
Chelsea Petrich has let her long running obsession with scent remain at the helm of her life, she’s always known it’s what she’s here to do. She found herself, feet planted firmly on her path forward, because she trusted that tug.
The first time I asked Chelsea to describe herself, she told me she was a “mad scientist”. That ability to recognize her authentic self and to claim it struck me, it also speaks to her sense of humor and her quirky way of being in this world. Everything Chelsea does, she approaches with equal parts reverence and science fiction. As she describes her relationship to scent she tells me, “smells have always been memories, for me they are actually a form of time travel”. She marvels at the feeling you get when you encounter a familiar scent. You know that feeling, don’t you? You walk into a place and recognize a certain smell and suddenly you’re transported back to a very specific time or place, a little magical blip in the timeline. And it’s those little hits of magic that she’s been chasing her entire life.
Chelsea grew up a curious kid who loved to play and explore. Born in Midvale Utah, she moved out to Bluffdale when she was 8 years old. In Bluffdale, she spent her time on her family’s land gardening with her grandpa and exploring the natural world. When she describes this time in her life she paints a picture through the scent of sagebrush, ponds, dirt, wet grass – the earthy scents that were the backdrop of her life.
When she was 11 she found her first aromatherapy book at the local library. When she tells this story you can feel the excitement of that little girl, of the door opening before her. She was transfixed. That year for her birthday her dad took her to a local apothecary, where she combed through endless shelves of essential oils and hand picked a collection of viles to take home with her. Here lie the beginnings of this mad scientist’s laboratory. She worked with recipes creating her own bath blends and bug repellants, in her words, “they were absolutely awful!”. And like all good scientists, she kept experimenting. At 16 Chelsea participated in a foreign exchange program and found herself in Avelin, France for 3 weeks. She travelled to Paris and visited world renowned perfumeries, she had landed smack-dab in the mecca of the fragrance industry. She goes on to say that this trip was the catalyst for so much in her life, that “the world suddenly opened up”. Sometimes the universe really does drop us right where we belong, nudging us to keep finding our way home.
Chelsea now owns her own soap making business, Soaper Hero (see, I told you she was funny). She describes soap making as “super alchemy”. She gets to take her love of scent and make it a tangible thing that then becomes a part of someone’s daily ritual. She uses all natural ingredients and colorants, incorporating beautiful butters, oils, clays and botanicals.
The final product is one that invites you to use it with intention, to slow down a bit, to honor your home-body.
We asked Chelsea to speak to the heart of what it is she’s bringing into our homes, and into the world.
You’re obviously so passionate about this project. How has this process been like home? Crowded countertops and messy dishes, amazing smells in the air, my favorite music playing. I imagine this is how a baker feels as they get lost in the craft. Every time I melt the oils & butters, or swirl colors in the pot, I feel like I’m stirring a new story. Sometimes a memory. Nothing takes me back in time to old homes & chapters like smell does.
I grew up in the country with a lot of nature and open space. The grass, earth, rivers, garden vegetables, even a frozen winter morning had a unique fragrance to it. Grass on Sunday smelled entirely different than Tuesday’s grass. The nicest smell of all existed in the vacuum closet of my childhood home. I’d shut myself in there and breathe up the bliss. I’m not sure what made it the most wonderful, and I haven’t smelled it since. I wanted so badly to recreate these smells for later. When I found my first book at the library on aromatherapy, that was it for me. I was obsessed with all the blending!
Soap to me, IS home.
Why does homemade soap matter? It matters because the ingredients haven’t been bleached, stripped or modified into words we can’t even pronounce. Made with love, care and precision out of oils, butters, clays and botanicals that your skin recognizes, and knows how to hold. Coconut oil, olive oil, shea butter, walnut powder, kaolin clay…. amazing and REAL, just as we are. This work is made from my hands, instead of a machine. Especially today, the human touch matters.
What’s possible when we’re in love with our home-body? Soapmaking for me, has always been an expression of love to the body. Showering, a daily ritual where we are intimate with ourselves, our unique shapes, and what we might consider to be our imperfections. Each part gets the same love as the rest with a bar of soap. Maybe a little less caress for the hard-to-reach spots, but the intention is there! The entire process is a reminder that we are worthy, in our entirety.
My hope is that as a person falls more in love with their home-body, the process of cleansing will slow down. More intentional, more ceremonial rather than a daily chore to check off.
Amen to that, friends!
Come smell for yourself and grab a piece of the magic here at The Shop at cityhome.
Name: Heather Harris / Nemeta Salê
Location: Salt Lake City, UT
Medium: Sacred Salts
Heather Harris is the kind of person that creates home wherever she finds herself. She knows in her bones that the boundary of where we begin and end is blurry at best, and that coming home means tuning in and listening. To ourselves. To the earth. To each other.
Heather grew up in Northern Utah in Ogden, and although she moved around a lot she said that she always carried with her a sense of home. After a stint outside of Utah in her 20s, Heather made her way back to the valley and in the process of reconnecting to our salty little city she found herself answering the call of the earth and its elements, particularly salt. She didn’t know why, or how, or what the pull was, but as a good listener does, Heather kept her ear to the ground and followed the intuitive tug, and in 2017 she started making her own blend of sacred salts.
Heather will tell you that when she first started it wasn’t that she had a burning desire to make these salts, rather she felt called to it. “Whether you call it the muse or the universe or nature, I’m just following every subtle guidance. Over a decade now, following this thread to minerals and the plant kingdom in general, it’s like I’m learning their language.
I work with the land and our relationship to it, not ownership but rather stewardship.
Whether working with a business owner or homeowner, it’s this re-orientation of what our relationship actually is with a space. The materials, the land, the plants, the animals and soil, these beings that have been here before us and will be here long after we’re gone.”
Heather’s overarching goal is to build a more conscious and loving way to coexist and be in close relationship with one another and the earth, so when it comes time to create she says that what’s most important to her is using as many local products as possible. Nearly 70% of the flowers and herbs she uses are grown in her garden and the remainder are sourced from a local apothecary. And lucky for us, that persistent feeling of home and grounding familiarity is infused in the products she makes and shares with us.
We asked Heather how we can implement what she’s creating into our daily lives, and about the direct line from her salts to Home.
How did you discover that salts were an essential part of creating home? In some ways it’s been in front us of all along, with salt being on our dinner table. Salt is such a profound amplifier of flavor and intention in collaboration with whatever it is paired with. It soaks up the elements around it as well as strengthening them, creating these two forces of harmonization.
What advice would you give folks that are wanting to use your salts for home practice? What would that intention be? I feel like the best place to start is with a simple intention or curiosity. You can start with the four corners of your yard or the perimeter of your house or apartment. You can also sprinkle them on your front door or put them in bowls at your front door. You may offer some to a tree, plant or flower that you notice on walks around your neighborhood. This is a simple way to begin your connection in grounding, and how you want to bring Home into your physical body, and create a more safe and resonant space within your physical home as well as your home on this earth. If you’d like to use them inside, pick 2-4 spots to begin with and put the salts in a bowl allowing them to draw out impurities, toxins or even negative energy. I leave that bowl out where the energy feels most dense for anywhere between a week, up to month. When it’s time to clear that energy away, I offer that salt either to a body of water like a local river, or even just a tree, flower or plant outside that you’d like to give gratitude to. You can also add these salts to your bath water or as a shower scrub. This is a great way to connect with the purifying and nourishing aspects of these salts and allow yourself to receive the intentions you’re setting.
During these times, why does it help to have an intentional homing practice with salts? During these unstable and uncertain times the message that I’ve been getting from having this intentional homing practice with salts is that there is always hope. And the more I focus on my service and who and what I’m here to serve, then hope remains alive in me. The vision that I see for our homes and communities, that’s the vision that I’m holding when I’m creating these salts. Above all else, my dream is for everyone to feel a sense of safety and belonging, and to me these two qualities of life really must be established in each of our personal lives. Working with these salts has allowed me to anchor, deepen and ground into my own safety, even when things may feel crazy, I know that I am safe.
You can find Heather’s blend of sacred salts here at cityhome. Come stop by the shop and pick up a jar of TLC for your home or home-body.
Name: Jane Philips
Location: Boulder, UT and Missoula, MT
Medium: Clay – primarily stoneware and porcelain
Jane Philips has always been on the feral side. In her own words she was a wild kid, dirty all the time. She recalls her mother always telling her, “life is an art project!”. Jane took those words quite literally, always making things look beautiful, and always in a state of play. To this day those qualities are infused in the ceramics that she creates, and it is precisely that beauty and play that draw you into her work. When you hold one of Jane’s pieces in your hands you get a sense of its character, that it has a story to tell. I believe in the energetic life of objects, and sometimes when I’m standing alone in the shop I imagine that after we’ve turned off the lights for the night, Jane’s pieces crawl down off of the table and mischievously dance around the room.
Jane grew up right here in Salt Lake City and took frequent trips with her family down to the small desert communities of Torrey and Boulder. She has always had an ongoing nostalgia for those places that she visited as a kid, and in 2017 she moved down to Boulder where she lives and works out of her studio. She originally went to school for environmental studies, and she says that her draw to working with clay comes from a place of loving earth, of being in the dirt, and of having a very somatic relationship with land and mud. Her understanding of clay comes naturally, it is a knowing, a remembering of sorts, and at times she says, borders on obsession. She’s had to reckon with the fact that a lot of the clay world is not environmentally friendly – materials are mined and gas kilns pollute just for the sake of art, and this is one of the reasons she was drawn to working with wood-fired kilns. Twice a year Jane loads her truck up with ceramics and makes the long drive up to Missoula Montana where she spends weeks prepping, loading and tending to her preferred wood-fired kiln, alongside a handful of other dedicated ceramicists.
At the end of it all she loses about 25% of the pieces that she loaded in, but what remains is pure magic.
We’re so excited to share Jane’s work with you, and we wanted to ask her a few questions about how she thinks about her work, beyond the wheel and kiln.
How would you hope having these items in someone’s home feels? What do they bring to home? I want people’s initial attraction to be what it is. I don’t want to have an influence over what they are for people. I only hope that whoever is meant to find them does, and is drawn to the pieces enough to bring them into their home. I make things for myself, and I want them to be whatever they are for other people, I send them out into the world and I’m happy for whatever they become. I truly love that people are choosing to bring something into their home that takes such a long time to create, and has such a long history.
How do ceramics influence the way you live? It’s an incredibly humbling medium. It’s really helped me with non-attachment, things break all of the time. In terms of craft, it is known to notoriously break your heart. You get one thing wrong and you can lose an entire kiln-load of work, it really teaches you how to let go. Not only do I use the clay to translate my life, it’s also an integral part of everyday life for me because it becomes something that you use. It’s kind of a constant even when I’m not making pieces, it’s always there, I’m always thinking about it. It’s very much part of how I see the world.
What’s your hope for the home environment that your pieces land in? Like your children, you hope that they’re loved for who they are. If this is the only piece that someone has that’s handmade, awesome! if it becomes a part of a collection, I love that too. I sometimes worry that because of the cost that they may not get used, my one hope is that they’re loved in a way that they’re used and they’re touched. These pieces are meant to be interacted with and loved.
Here’s to more interaction and love, friends!
You can find Jane’s work here at cityhome, in our tiendita (Spanish for “tiny shop”). Come see us and take home your own piece of the magic.