Just north of Los Angeles, Evan Chambers’ glassblowing studio springs out from a small warehouse district like a scene from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Under the skylight of a 10-foot industrial ceiling is a cold, foreboding blacksmith’s forge — which, on an active day, would heat up to 2,500 degrees — surrounded by uncut, conical metal templates awaiting manipulation. On a workbench nearby, sea mine-shaped lamps stand on metal casts of hawk feet alongside caged bubble glass lanterns that appear as if they might burst from internal pressure. Outside is a serene garden under a canopy of branches weighed down by iridescent copper bells, all handmade.

Sitting on a worn wooden chair in the garden on a cool Tuesday afternoon, Chambers, 43, a professional glass and metalsmith, reflected on his antiquated strain of craftsmanship. He said his medium may have seen its peak during the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau movement, which saw an embrace of organic forms and a rejection of Industrial Age mass-produced monotony.

Evan Chambers walks through his studio.

“Now all those artists are gone, and all that art is gone,” Chambers said, peering toward his studio, which houses Louis Comfort Tiffany lamps in disrepair. “I feel like I’m trying to recreate this time that I never could quite understand.”

There have been many other times Chambers could not quite grasp: The time his parents sold his childhood home, where he first grew to love art; the time his sister moved away from Altadena, which he called the “perfect place,” to pursue glassblowing; and the time when, as his hometown was consumed by the Eaton fire, he felt authorities did little to help.

But if there is one thing Chambers does understand, it lies somewhere deep in the dark, steel “glory hole” of a forge.

“You see a piece of glass from 120 years ago, when there was real craftsmanship, and you think, ‘You know, this is badass,’” Chambers said. “To be able to hit that and then take it in your own creative direction, I like that challenge. … It’s like a game.”

Growing up in working-class Altadena as the second child of a silversmith mother and metalworker father, both of whom have a master’s degree in art and an aversion to television, Chambers spent much of his life immersed in the robust arts-and-crafts scene of Pasadena in the early 2000s.

Evan Chambers in the garden of his studio.

“[In Pasadena,] there were Craftsman homes, there’s green homes. … Seeing those homes and all the exterior lanterns with all this beautiful, iridescent glass and copper work, I think that kind of informed my art,” Chambers said. “Altadena more informed the person I wanted to be.”

Unlike some of his artistic peers, who idealized studios and showcases in New York or Europe, Chambers never wanted to leave Altadena. “Altadena has always been a creative place, pretty full of and accepting of eccentrics,” he said. “When my sister went to college, I was sobbing, like, ‘How could you move away?’”

As defiant teenagers tend to do, Chambers departed from the family profession, admitted to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as an agricultural business major. Self-admittedly, Chambers only got through three years before he switched to English and began working out of an unconventional glassblowing studio.

“Going there, it was like the prettiest place ever; very pastoral, it blew my mind,” Chambers said. “There’s all these glassblowers up there, and they’re doing all this nature-inspired work, and then I ended up five years in.”

Evan Chambers holds a template for his “snail boy” piece.

Many of Chambers’ projects center on the interaction between the natural and the practical. On one lamp in the studio, tentacles hold up cylindrical copper spires with submarine-style looking glasses to reveal a small bulb inside. Glass vases with metallic finishes of unnatural blue, green and gold are drowned in palm leaf motifs, ready to be flowered.

Theodora Coleman, owner of the Gold Bug independent gallery in Pasadena — which has represented Chambers for nearly two decades — said she feels that Chambers’ metalwork harkens back to epic journeys in literature, fitting appropriately into a world crafted by the likes of French writer Jules Verne. His glasswork, she said, is understood as preeminent by Tiffany historians, who don’t often come by artists who can authentically reproduce the luster of age-worn glass.

“There’s a whimsy to it, but I think there’s also something that can be brought into a more contemporary environment,” Coleman said.

Near the end of college, working out of a glass studio without pay or financial support from his parents, Chambers used his handiwork skills to build a tree house near his campus that he lived in for two years to avoid rising rent costs.

“I wanted to spend more time in nature and I wanted to be able to spend whatever money I was making on renting time at a glass studio,” Chambers said.

He would eventually meet his wife, Caitlin, then an English student at Cal Poly. Not long after, he was able to ditch the cold, insular tree house for a beachside home her family owned in the area.

Evan Chambers’ glass vases are on display at his studio.

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“I think he was about 24 and I had never met anyone that talked about beauty the way he did,” said Caitlin Chambers, now an English professor at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design. “I don’t think it’s really typical for young men to be like, ‘This is beautiful.’ I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so nice to hear from someone who has that kind of attunement with the world.’”

Around that time, Chambers fully delved into pursuing mastery of an art form buried under a century. As he recounted the odyssey, more than 20 years of practice could be charted through various blotches and burn scars on his arms.

“Everything else fades away,” Chambers said. “All my rage fades away, and I’m just focused on the thing.”

But that dormant rage would eventually return, to the point where his art became secondary. Years after resettling in west Altadena with Caitlin and having two children — Edie, 9, and John, 5 — tragedy struck the quaint family home: the Eaton fire.

The handling of the Eaton fire is the subject of an ongoing civil rights investigation by the California Department of Justice. Fire victims from the historically Black west Altadena community have alleged discrimination by emergency responders that resulted in 14,021 burned acres, 19 deaths and 9,000 destroyed buildings — one being Chambers’ — over the course of the 25-day fire.

Throughout the next year, Chambers hardly worked. He coordinated with neighbors to assist with fundraising projects; searched for art and jewelry for neighbors in charred, empty lots, desperately attempting to restore those pieces; and protested on the lawn of the fire department and sheriff, calling for a thorough autopsy of what went wrong in west Altadena during the fire.

“Accountability is really big with me,” Chambers said. “West Altadenans were literally burning in their homes. … It’s not OK.”

A close-up of an art piece by Evan Chambers.

Metal appendages that Chambers will use for future works.

This stubborn defiance is also present in Chambers’ commitment to the “golden age” of decorative art. The turn-of-the-century molds in his studio — which use botanic motifs, blossoming forms with metallic winged and floral attachments — look like desk toppers fit for an early 1900s eccentric obsessed with Darwinism and industrialization.

“The [Art Nouveau] movement was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and automation,” Caitlin said. “We might be in that kind of time, which, because of AI, is a revival of the handmade. … He’s a part of that.”

On his website, Chambers’ pieces range from $1,550 for the “baby opium gazer” lamp to $12,500 for the “sterling opium gazer.” His organic forms, including a glowing cicada and whale lamp, fall between $2,000 and $4,000.

Evan Chambers surrounded by lamps he created.

When Altadena began the slog of a fire recovery effort, Chambers and his wife stumbled upon an opportunity reminiscent of the rent-free tree house he built in college: a 2,400-square-foot Craftsman-style home in Hollywood that was to be demolished. The house was purchased for $1 from the developer, sectioned and transported on flatbed trucks to Altadena. It was cheaper than purchasing a new home, Chambers said.

“It was a time in Altadena where if anybody needed anything, it was very open,” Chambers said. “I never wanted to leave.”

As he sat under a ray of natural light in his studio, his creations staring at his back through a hundred radiant eyes and looking glasses, Chambers sat slouching. He said he didn’t know how close he would come to fully comprehending the era he pursued in his art, but behind him, the decade-old soot on the rim of the inactive forge indicated that another age of artisanship may have passed unnoticed.

When Halle Bailey moved from Georgia to Los Angeles as a wide-eyed preteen nearly 15 years ago, the city felt like a wonderland of possibility.

“Being from the South, when you first come to L.A., you’re like, ‘Hollywood. Wow. This is where all the celebrities are,’” says the Grammy-nominated singer and actress. At any moment, she thought she might cross paths with Halle Berry — the similarly named actress she’s often mistaken for — on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

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But after living in the city for a while, Bailey, now 26, says she realized L.A. is made up of all sorts of different pockets — ones “where people are really Hollywood, bougie” and others “where people are chill, like hippies,” she says. Her favorite neighborhoods are Silver Lake, Venice and “places where people are just like, yeah, one love,” she says, laughing.

These days, Bailey is one of the celebrities people would be thrilled to see strolling down Hollywood Boulevard. She’s built a career that bridges music, TV and film: By 13, she and her sister Chloe Bailey — together known as Chloe x Halle — had signed to Beyoncé’s label; she’s earned six Grammy nominations (including one for her debut solo album released last fall); and she played young Nettie in “The Color Purple” and starred as Ariel in Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid,” a blockbuster role she’s recently been reflecting on.

Bailey’s next venture? Starring in her first romantic comedy, Universal’s “You, Me & Tuscany,” which hits theaters April 10. She plays Anna, a young woman who impulsively crashes at a empty Italian villa by pretending to be the owner’s fiancée.

“It felt good to play a young woman who was grown, but still discovering herself,” she says. “I felt like I was playing the essence of the Halle who is finding herself now.”

On her perfect Sunday in L.A., Bailey would have a day of fun with her 2-year-old son, Halo. Here’s what they’d do.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

7:30 a.m.: Wake up and jump into mommy duties

I love mornings. I leave my curtains open while I sleep because I like when the sun wakes me up. We all doomscroll, which is kind of bad to say, but the first thing I check is my phone. Then I have mommy duties right at 8 a.m. Sometimes before [Halo] wakes up, I get a chance to do some things for myself like go outside and sit in the sun for some meditation or stretching. I don’t get to do it every day, but I try. Or I’ll make some tea or a smoothie and just have a moment of gratitude for waking up that day.

8:30 a.m.: Crank up the music

Once Halo is up, we do breakfast right away. I don’t know why I’m super into boiled eggs right now [laughs]. But I love a boiled egg in the morning with either avocado or hash browns. My baby loves hash browns too. I try to make a balanced breakfast and then from there it’s kind of party time.

We’ve been blasting the new Jill Scott album and it’s really cool how the music you play in your house can just change the mood, the vibe and bring good energy into the space that you’re in. And on a Sunday, I don’t know if it’s just because of the way I was raised, but automatically I think, “OK, I need to straighten up for the week. I need to get the house reset.” So maybe I’m cleaning up the kitchen or organizing toys, or making sure the bathroom is straight, or washing clothes while the music is blasting and we’re dancing around, having fun.

12 p.m.: Solo time while the baby naps

I’ll take a lunch break. If I’m in the cooking mood, I love making comfort food like chicken and rice with cabbage and mac and cheese. Something that is just warm and comfy. If I’m not doing that, I’m ordering Wing Stop or Chipotle. I would chill outside for a while until my son’s nap time, which is around 12:30 p.m. He’ll sleep until like 3:30 p.m., so then I have two hours to myself and sometimes I do nothing. Sometimes I just need to sit down and I’ll be on my phone on TikTok or I’ll watch a show. I recently binged the new “Love is Blind” season. I also started watching “Real Housewives” again, but, like, the beginning seasons. I really love the show “My Strange Addiction.” It’s just so hilarious to me. Those are some guilt-free shows that I turn on and my brain can turn off.

I might even go into the studio if I’m hearing a melody in my head or pick up my guitar. Sometimes I might take a nap too, and that feels really good on a Sunday.

4 p.m.: Go on an easy sunset hike

If I feel up for leaving the house, we’ll go for a walk, to the park or maybe even a sunset hike. I’ve always been a nature girl and I feel like it just grounds me, and I’m able to center myself, especially for the start of a new week. There’s a lot of really beautiful hikes in California, but I’ve found ones that are easy and safe to take a baby on so I’m not stressing if he’s running ahead of me or behind me. On a Sunday, you just want to rest, so you’re not trying to do a full-blown workout. Sometimes we’ll get halfway through and then we’ll turn back and go home [laughs].

Near Studio City, there’s a really good one called Fryman [Canyon]. It’s hard in the beginning, but as you get higher it gets easier and you see the view, and you’re just like, “I can do this.” We recently went to Point Dume, which I had never been to, but I saw the view on TikTok. It’s a really beautiful beach hike in Malibu and I love it there. The hike up is super easy, but there’s a field of flowers that you walk through to get to the viewpoint where everyone takes pictures overlooking the beach.

6:30 p.m.: Bath time

I love a bubble bath. If my son is with me that night, we do a whole fun toys in the bath type of vibe. But if it’s a solo night, it’s like candles, lavender bubbles, lights are dim, jazz music is playing in the background, like Billie Holiday, and that is the ultimate reset.

7:30 p.m.: Dinner and a show

If I have a sitter, I might go out to dinner. I like Lucia, which is a Caribbean restaurant in Hollywood. I think the first time I went, they had a really good oxtail mac and cheese. When I went back the menu had changed and I ordered the jerk chicken, which was also good. Also, I’ve been loving the Blue Note recently. I saw Esperanza Spalding there last year.

10 p.m.: Watch something low–stakes before bed

Sometimes I try to force myself to turn off all screens, all phones and go to bed because I need the sleep. It’s either that or I’m up watching something. I just really like watching things that make me feel like I can laugh and I don’t have to think about it. I get really emotionally invested in shows. If I try to watch “The Pitt” at the end of the day, it feels so emotionally exhausting. During the day is OK, but at nighttime, I just need to laugh.