Lifestyle
How a forgotten California border town became a hip hideaway — with hot springs and music
The first two surprises, as you roll up Old Highway 80 into this dry and silent Sonoran Desert town, might be the steam and the music.
The steam rises from two pools at the recently reborn Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The music seeps from a bathhouse ruin where the hotel stages weekend performances.
On this night it’s a torch song from long ago, sung by an acoustic duo for a small, rapt, eclectic audience — hipsters in their 30s, retirees in their 70s, desert rats and spa seekers, all sitting under the open sky as night falls on the roofless building, a few million surrounding boulders and a long, tall fence that runs into the hills.
These are features that California daydreams are made of, and this emergent scene is luring visitors to an outpost 70 miles southeast of downtown San Diego.
Bar patio area of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Pia Riverola)
“It’s a refuge from the stressors of the city. Things seem to wash away here,” co-owner Melissa Strukel said recently.
Now, a few more surprises: The town of Jacumba Hot Springs has been down on its luck for decades. That long fence, 2,100 feet south of the hotel, is the Mexican border, where undocumented migrants pass regularly and a crisis flared last year. And the hotel’s owners are new to town and the business.
“Everything is the first time,” Strukel said.
It was four years ago, early in the COVID shutdown, that Strukel, a veteran San Diego designer and special-event rental entrepreneur, decided to take a drive.
She wound up in a town she’d never noticed before, standing outside a bedraggled old motel, smitten.
Siren Suite 11at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Mikael Kennedy)
So smitten, in fact, that she climbed over a wall to get a better look.
“I just knew right away that I belonged here,” Strukel said.
Soon she learned that the motel was for sale — with a catch. The owner wanted to sell it in a 150-acre package deal with most of the commercial property in town: a gas station (without gas), several homes and storefronts, a ruined bathhouse and a littered mess that was once a man-made lake.
Undeterred, Strukel enlisted her business partner Corbin Winters and they formed a plan.
They would recruit their friend Jeff Osborne, a former client and real estate business veteran. They would make the 24-room motel and restaurant into a resort with 18 rooms, two suites, restaurant, bar and global desert vibe, drawing on influences from Mexico to Marfa to Morocco.
They would replumb the hot springs to take advantage of the alkaline water’s “silky texture,” refill the lake, recruit a veteran general manager for the hotel and use the houses as vacation rentals, including two with their own soaking tubs.
Jacumba Lake is a recently revived reservoir fed by the same springs that feed the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The hotel’s owners worked to refill the lake and plant the shoreline with palm trees.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
They would build a new sense of community in Jacumba Hot Springs, where the population is 540, the median age around 62, and the median income and property values are some of the lowest in the county. The nearest full-fledged grocery store is 45 minutes away; the nearest public school, several miles down the road; the nearest legal border crossing, an hour away in Tecate.
“At first I was like, ‘ah, no way,’” Osborne recalled.
But Osborne, 38, whose experience includes several years of house-flipping and short-term rental management, thought on it some more. He drove into town, spent a night in a tent by the lake and changed his mind.
By October 2020 a deal was done. Doing business as We Are Human Kind Inc., the trio paid more than $1.6 million — but less than $3.9 million, Osborne said, declining to be more specific.
Unlike many hotel owners, all three moved to town, taking on major roles in a community short on resources and long on characters.
“This community was the end of the line for a long time,” said Sam Schultz, 69, who lives east of town at the Desert View Tower with eight dogs and at least 12 cats.
Desert View Tower was built as a tourist attraction in the 1920s.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
On any day, migrants might be illegally crossing the border nearby, breaching a fence that starts, stops and varies in height, a product of shifting politics and stony slopes.
Yet most of the time, border-crossers are quickly met and taken away by the Border Patrol agents who steadily cruise the dirt roads and highway.
“I haven’t seen one person [crossing] for a couple of weeks now,” said Osborne, who lives in a stone house on a knoll known as Snob Hill. “I live less than a thousand feet from the border … and I don’t lock my doors.”
During my two days in town, I didn’t see anyone crossing, either. But I met plenty of the neighbors.
In the Exotic Desert Hideaway — a.k.a. the hotel bar — you might bump into Roman Wrosz, a 68-year-old inventor and longtime local who flies gliders at the otherwise lonely Jacumba airport.
Along the highway east of town, you will probably encounter Coyote, a 67-year-old junkyard proprietor with a booming baritone voice and a truck that says “UFO retrieval and repairs.”
Exotic Desert Hideaway bar at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Mikael Kennedy)
The Jacumba Hot Springs hotel includes a dark bar decorated with paintings of nudes.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
If you see a bearded man in a wheelchair working the register at Sunday breakfast in the town’s community center, that’s probably Eldon Caldwell, 75, who lives in one of the little houses the newcomers purchased.
“They inherited me as tenant,” Caldwell said. “They haven’t raised my rent. They put a shower in for me.”
While Caldwell works the register at those Sunday community center breakfasts, Winters volunteers every other week as a server — again, not standard hotelier behavior. Osborne has signed on as the center’s board president.
“It’s magnificent, what they’ve done,” said Kirk Gilliam, a 69-year-old artist/electrician who builds robot sculptures in a gallery two doors down from the Mountain Sage market on Old Highway 80.
If the new hotel team has its way, more neighbors will arrive soon to fill open hotel jobs and take over storefront vacancies.
“This is not a flip,” said Strukel.
Bathroom scene at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Mikael Kennedy; Pia Riverola)
It is, however, one of biggest changes in town since 1919. That’s when a San Diego magnate named John Spreckels opened his “impossible railroad,” running tracks through Jacumba on the boulder-filled hill-and-valley path from San Diego to Yuma.
Next came Highway 80 and speculator Bert Vaughn, who built a four-story hotel, bathhouse and a desert view tower to lure San Diego-Arizona drivers off the road. By the 1950s, a motel and man-made lake had been added.
At the town’s peak, Osborne said, “they say there were 5,000 people here on the weekends.”
But the rail line fell idle. Interstate 8 (two miles north of town) stole most of the passing traffic in the 1970s. The bathhouse and four-story hotel burned.
For a while it seemed the town’s saviors might be a pair of nudists: In the 1990s, David and Helen Landman bought an RV park outside town, converted it into a clothing-optional resort and moved in. Then in 2012, the Landmans bought and made improvements on most of downtown. But as the pandemic began, the couple’s patience ran out. They sold the hotel and most of downtown to Strukel, Winters and Osborne, then peddled the clothing-optional resort, DeAnza Springs, to other buyers in early 2021.
By early last year, the team was deep into redesign and reconstruction, and it was clear that making over the hotel and downtown Jacumba Hot Springs would cost more than buying them did.
The Solstice Pool at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Kate Berry)
To bring back the lake, the three hired workers to spend months scraping with a tractor, consulted with the nonprofit group Indigenous Regeneration, then added about 70 California-native palm trees, which line a sandy shore.
Then the world intervened. In the space of a few spring days, hundreds of immigrants surged over and around the border fence.
Most had come from far beyond Mexico, speaking Chinese, Portuguese and other languages, apparently drawn by the expiration of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health measure that allowed authorities to turn away asylum-seekers more easily. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the migrants had been “callously placed [in the area] by for-profit smuggling organizations.”
Once across, the migrants gathered in three encampments and built campfires in the hills south of Old Highway 80, eager to be seen and considered for asylum, most of them without food, water or protection from the elements.
“It was two weeks of bad,” Strukel said.
While the Border Patrol decided how to respond, Jacumba locals spread the news. The hotel team set up a collection site and began to gather and distribute supplies with help from Border Kindness, a Mexicali-based nonprofit, and other groups.
“There were locals who brought out food and supplies, and there were others who hated them for that,” said Gilliam.
The co-owners of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, seen in the old gas station that serves as their office, are (from left) Corbin Winters, Melissa Strukel and Jeff Osborne.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
The hoteliers “weren’t even open and they were using the kitchen as a place for people to bring supplies,” said Kelly Overton, executive director of Border Kindness. “There was no foreseeable benefit to them. They chose to do what they thought was the right thing. … Not everybody makes that decision when it comes to their business and their money.”
As the flow continued into 2024, the Border Patrol imposed more order and sent more buses. Then Mexico boosted its immigration law enforcement near the border and the Biden administration tightened asylum restrictions. Now, Border Patrol officials and locals agree that numbers are down again.
At the hotel, Strukel, Winters and Osborne began a gradual opening in late 2023, launching into daily operation in February, inviting newcomers to explore “an unexpected escape on the dusty edge of everything.”
Its workforce has grown to about 75 people, including general manager Natalie Richards from San Diego, chef Leo Ceja from Los Angeles and director of special programming and hospitality Juan Miron, originally from Tijuana.
I arrived on a Friday, ducking into a rustic-chic trailer that houses the front desk.
The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, built as a motel and dramatically reborn in 2024 as a boutique hotel, includes Moroccan design details, multiple pools, record players and curated paperbacks in guest rooms.
(Mikael Kennedy)
Beyond the Moroccan entry gate and wind chimes from Arcosanti in Arizona, every guest room features stylish tiling, a turntable and an adventurously curated selection of books and albums. (Mine included two Louis L’Amour paperbacks and albums by country crooner Charley Crockett and Ethiopian sax player Getatchew Mekuriar.)
Most guests so far have come from San Diego County, “a lot of creative professionals,” Osborne said, and “people that like things off the beaten path, that like going down dirt roads.” Rates typically start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends. (The only other lodging option within five miles of town is the rustic DeAnza Springs Resort.)
That afternoon, guests lounged around the Solstice Pool and Ritual Pool (where sometimes movies are screened) or stepped inside to the warmer soaking tub in the Echo Room.
The Exotic Desert Hideaway Bar — as dim as the desert day is bright— features kitschy nudes on the walls, DJs on weekends, $5 beer during happy hour and a $78 cocktail situation known as “The Fortune Teller.” (It comes flaming in a cauldron, includes tequila and serves six.)
Down the block, Kirk Gilliam usually has his gallery open on weekends. Next to the gallery, David Lampley sells vintage clothes at the Impossible Railroad Trading Post and serves as director of auditory and visual experiences for the hotel. (If you’d like to make a mono recording on a 1938 record-cutting machine, he can help with that too.)
Out at the born-again lake, Coyote the junk dealer has contributed three kayaks and a canoe for anyone who feels like paddling. There’s no fishing, but wildlife sightings are common, including a very large cat — a black jaguar? — at water’s edge in early October.
Though the old bathhouse down the street remains in ruins, it’s busy almost every Saturday night. That’s when the hotel team dresses the roofless structure up with bistro lights and candles and invites an eclectic mix of musicians to play under the stars. Besides torch songs, sea shanties, Latino roots and rockabilly tunes have been heard.
The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel’s amenities include an old bathhouse, now without water or roof, where the hotel stages weekly candlelight concerts. The performers are Tiny and Mary, a sibling duo.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
“I’ve been coming out here since I was a teenager, and I never told anyone about it,” singer-songerwriter Mary Simich, 31, told me. “I was afraid people would ruin it.”
Now Simich, who lives in Orange County, is trying to buy a house in town.
The border remains a wild card (especially with new presidents in office or coming soon on both sides of the border). But this dusty little town is already in transition.
Strukel, Winters and Osborne say occupancy at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel is now running above 90%. Entrepreneur Max Daily, semi-famous in San Diego for running the pop-up Oslo Sardine Bar, has announced plans to open an eatery on Old Highway 80 with a stage for live music. Possible name: the Jacumba Yacht Club.
Meanwhile at DeAnza Springs — the former clothing-optional resort north of town — new owners Luke Wasyliu and Kevin Cho have made clothing mandatory, upgraded infrastructure and boosted a focus on wellness, glamping and weekend music festivals, including Youtopia, an October gathering aimed at devotees of Burning Man.
“It’s gentrification,” neighbor Sam Schultz said recently, sitting near the entrance of the Desert View Tower. “And a certain amount of gentrification is good for us around here.”
What to do, see and eat in and near Jacumba
Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, 44500 Old Highway 80, Jacumba Hot Springs; (760) 766-4333. Room rates start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends.
DeAnza Springs Resort, 1951 Carrizo Gorge Road, Jacumba Hot Springs; (619) 766-4301. The campground has 311 RV sites and about two dozen rental travel trailers, tiny homes, tent sites and motel rooms, two pools and a restaurant. Neighbored on three sides by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, it also has many trails, including the scenic 1.1-mile Temple Peak Loop Trail. Hikers pay $5 each for trail access, a good bargain. Often hosts weekend music festivals.
Desert View Tower, In-Ko-Pah Road, Jacumba; (619) 971-2845. The view from this 70-foot tower is OK. The best part of the property is the neighboring trail among boulders, where someone long ago carved and painted all sort of faces and creatures. Adult admission $9.50.
Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, 750 Depot St., Campo. Open Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission $10 for adults. The museum is a place for hard-core train people, unless you’re going on a train ride (about 10.5 miles round-trip). Those are offered on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., at varying prices. The museum also has a location in La Mesa.
Gaskill Brothers Stone Store Museum, Forest Gate Road and Historic Highway 94, Campo; (619) 980-2013. Includes a timeline on local history. The upstairs of the stone story museum is mostly about the Buffalo Soldiers. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
Camp Lockett Event & Equestrian Facility, 799 Forest Gate Rd., Campo; (619) 369-9399. Including a Buffalo Soldier Museum, horse facilities and camping area. The camp, built in 1941 and closed in 1946, was the last base of operations for Black “Buffalo Soldiers” before the U.S. Army integrated and disbanded cavalry units. The Buffalo Soldiers guarded the U.S.’ southern border and Italian prisoners of war. Museum opens Saturday 9 a.m.- 5p.m., closed in December.
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
Lifestyle
This spring, have a tea ceremony inside of an art installation and shop the latest Givenchy
Givenchy by Sarah Burton introduces the Snatch
Givenchy’s “The Snatch” handbag.
(Marc Piasecki / Getty Images)
Echoing the designer’s ready-to-wear sculptural designs, the Snatch from Givenchy by Sarah Burton is sensually shaped by the contours of the person who carries it. Its supple leather, fluid silhouette and three sizes allow it to slip effortlessly and intimately into the hand, over the shoulder or across the body. Now available. givenchy.com
Guess Jeans opens new L.A. store
Guess Jeans store interior.
(Josh Cho)
In a move familiar to many millennials these days, Guess Jeans has returned home in its 45th year. The new flagship store in West Hollywood is both a return to its California roots and an envisioning of its future still ahead. While the brand may be an established icon, the store boldly reimagines the retail space as a living laboratory for design, craftsmanship and collaboration, with dedicated workshop and customization spaces. 8700 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. guess.com
Louis Vuitton’s new Color Blossom collection
Louis Vuitton’s new Color Blossom collection highlights sodalite.
(Louis Vuitton)
Taylor Swift’s sky may be opalite, but the starry blue hues in the new jewels of Louis Vuitton’s Color Blossom collection belong to sodalite. Rarely used in jewelry, the dark navy of sodalite adds an unexpected layer of depth to Color Blossom’s existing luminous gemstone lineup. Sun and star motifs rendered in gold enhance the gem’s night sky coloring, while the classic flower designs celebrate the 130th anniversary of the Louis Vuitton Monogram. Sodalite pieces available March 6, entire collection available April 4. louisvuitton.com
Loro Piana debuts Library of Knits
Loro Piana’s Library of Knits comes in over 20 shades.
(Lora Piana)
L.A.’s (many) winter showers bring spring wildflowers, and a bouquet of Loro Piana’s new Library of Knits fits right into the vibrant spectacle. The exquisitely soft cashmere pieces in classic styles now come in over 20 shades inspired by Sergio Loro Piana’s personal wardrobe. With a spectrum ranging from blues and greens to corals and creams, it’s hard to choose just one for a frolic in the fields. Now available. loropiana.com
Margesherwood X Peanuts
The Margesherwood X Peanuts collaboration features instantly recognizable motifs.
(Marge Sherwood)
Love is famously in the air this time of year, apparently even for cartoon characters. This enduring love is illustrated (literally) in the Margesherwood X Peanuts collaboration. Inspired by the heart-fluttering love letters Sally writes to Linus, the designs feature instantly recognizable motifs that marry the Peanuts’ charm with Margesherwood’s refined silhouettes. The zig-zag of that famous yellow shirt winkingly graces a crescent baguette, while the black stripes of Linus’s red red shirt wrap around a slouchy shoulder bag. For the true heads and lovers, there’s even a petite hobo emblazoned with Sally’s pet name for Linus: “FOR MY SWEET BABBOO.” Now available. margesherwood.com
Ryan Preciado at Hollyhock House
Ryan Preciado’s site-responsive “Diary of a Fly” at Hollyhock House features Oaxacan-woven textiles.
(Roman Koval)
Ryan Preciado’s new site-responsive installation at Hollyhock House, “Diary of a Fly,” is titled after a late-1930s musical composition by Béla Bartók that imitates the frenzied pace of a fly — a fitting name since his show reconceptualizes the experience of the springtime pest flitting around a house. Instead of hovering around overripe fruit or stalking a trash can long neglected, however, viewers are invited to take in Preciado’s Oaxacan-woven textiles and brightly colored sculptures situated throughout the city’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site. Open through April 25. 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles. hollyhockhouse.org
Veronica Fernandez at Anat Ebgi
Veronica Fernanadez’s “Prey” filters childhood memories through experience and emotion.
(Veronica Fernandez)
In the figurative paintings of Veronica Fernandez’s first solo exhibition, “Prey,” the artist’s childhood is recalled through dreamlike and fantastical scenes, with memories filtered through experience and emotion. Many of her works place a child at the center of the scene among family, friends and caretakers, who usually appear shadow-like at the edges of the paintings. As a kid, Fernandez endured periods of homelessness. But rather than depict a childhood of adversity, her paintings empower the kids within them to claim their own space, imbuing her memories with strength and light. Open through April 4. 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. anatebgi.com
Dior launches J’Adore Intense
Dior’s J’Adore Intense captures the scent of solar flowers with Rihanna as its muse.
(J’Adore)
Florals for spring can be groundbreaking, especially when they’re created with none other than Rihanna as their muse. Dior’s J’Adore Intense captures the scent of solar flowers — jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose, violet — right before they burst into fruit. The result is a warm, bold, addictive fragrance that drips with sensuality and femininity, down to the curves of its signature gold and glass figure-eight amphora. In other words, it’s Rihanna in a bottle. Available now. dior.com
Rocky’s Matcha X Oscar Tuazon at Morán Morán
Rocky’s Matcha hosts Japanese tea ceremonies in an ensō-inspired tea house from Oscar Tuazon at Morán Morán.
(Stade New York)
The single, uninhibited brushstroke of the ensō, the circular form in Zen art, serves as a record of a moment. Commissioned by Rocky’s Matcha, Oscar Tuazon’s “Circle House” at Morán Morán shares both the ensō’s form and its call to mindfulness. In the artist’s tea house, constructed from cardboard, wood and tatami mats, architecture is inseparable from ritual: visitors will soon be able to partake in a Japanese tea ceremony inside the installation, thereby participating in a choreography of attention not unlike the act of gliding an ink brush across a sheet of washi. Open through December 31. 641 N. Western Ave. Los Angeles. Subscribe to rocky’s newsletter for tea ceremony information. rockysmatcha.com and moranmorangallery.com
Celebrate Mr. Wash’s new book, “Artists in Space”
Celebrate the launch of Mr. Wash’s new book of studio visits and interviews with other L.A. artists.
(Mr Wash)
Make your first BBQ of the season a meaningful one at the Art By Wash Studio & Community Center, where Compton artist and criminal justice advocate, Mr. Wash, will celebrate the release of his book “Artists in Space.” Proceeds from the book, which features interviews and studio visits with 20 Angeleno residents, go toward establishing the new community center where individuals returning home from incarceration will have access to art classes, creative residencies and housing. Mr. Wash will be in conversation with Patrisse Culllors and Evan Pricco (co-publisher and founder of the Unibrow) as well as displaying new works. The event is on March 7 from 2-6 p.m. 15 W. Rosecrans Ave., Compton. artbywash.com
Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
Kate Green/Getty Images
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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