An Inspiration Trip with Fort Makers
Sometimes a weekend getaway to Pennsylvania is what it takes.
Nana Spears’s road trip across the country inspired her so much that she decided to launch Fort Makers, a Brooklyn-based design collective, with painting phenom Naomi Clark. And on a recent fall weekend, Nana, Naomi, Naomi’s boyfriend Noah, and Nana’s boyfriend Daniel went to Pennsylvania to pick up even more ideas by visiting the stomping grounds of local craftsmen and architects. They stopped at wood sculptor Wharton Esherick’s home, checked out The Mattress Factory museum’s permanent exhibit on light-and-space artist James Turrell, and rounded out the trip with visits to two Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Nana gives us a look at one of their favorite stops—Wright’s Duncan House—that will no doubt influence their future designs. —candice chan
“This house is at the Polymath Park Resort. It was moved from outside of Chicago to the Laurel Highlands. They moved a house. Wow. The man who helped reconstruct it told us all about the experience.”
“Our favorite parts of the house were the stone fireplace, the slight slant of the house’s roof, and the overall layout. It has a huge open living space, with a large kitchen, and three private bedrooms off a long hallway. The house is Usonian—meaning a Wright-designed home from the thirties with no attic or basement and very little ornamentation.”
“That’s one of Naomi’s blankets hanging in the living room—we added our own touches to the house and made it a little bit more cozy while we were there. The fireplace, the cool vintage books and barware, and the shag carpet in this room all stood out to us.”
“The area around the house is the Laurel Highlands. It’s beautiful—large, open spaces for farming mixed with woods—and the fall foliage was brilliant. There was a short nature walk on Polymath’s property that led to a little lake, which is where we took a lot of the pictures. That’s Noah, Daniel, and Nana posing underneath the blankets.”
“We love seeing our blankets outside. They’re very often informed by the natural world, and for this trip, we brought blankets that would look good in a fall setting. We chose this fence to hang them because we could make a sort of fort, so to speak, and paint a long line using the fence’s shape. The most fun and exciting moments of this trip were playing with our art in the woods and taking pictures. At the end of the day, we were that good kind of tired.”
Into those blankets above? Then you’re not going to want the edition Nana and Naomi created for us: hand-painted cashmere-and-wool scarves.
