Inventory at Eye of the Day in 1994:
1. Wine barrels cut in half
2. Wine barrels cut in quarters
3. Wine barrels cut in three-quarters
4. Whole wine barrels
5. Mexican pottery
6. Potting soil
Inventory at Eye of the Day in 2010:
Okay. No lists. But LOTS MORE than in 1994. When we first started Eye of the Day our focus was (obviously) wine barrel planters and a few pots. That’s a story for another time. Not too long after the store moved to Carpinteria from Santa Ynez (yet another story) we made our first trip to Europe and our lives and our store changed forever. Our maiden trip to the Paris Gift Show spun us off to the countryside of France and that of Italy and here the story lies.
Strewn about the grounds of a walled 14th century medieval Tuscan village, now a beautiful inn, we began to take notice of burnished russet red oil jars, or orcios. Many of them showed production dates in the 1800s, some even in the 1700s. And, the terracotta from which they were made was rich and warm, displaying not necessarily age, but antiquity. It was the perfect setting to see them – we could imagine them charming the gardens of California and beyond. We were pulled with a new focus to locate some to ship to our store and so now drove the countryside in earnest. During that first Orcio Locating Tour we became pro at catching a tiny slice of old terracotta color in a field, on a porch, in an abandoned barn. Once we looked in a barn and found two fantastic old farm wagons, one with faint traces of blue, red, yellow and green paint and found that the wagons were older than the 1953 the faded color depicted. That was the year it was RE-painted. My birth year. The wagons had once been pulled by horses in the local village harvest parade. But not a soul could see them stored in the old barn. Brent used his considerable intelligence and ingenuousness and lined the way for these, the first of our antique finds, to make their way to Eye of the Day. You will be able to see them, stored in plain sight, adding to the rich and varied weave of old and new at Eye of the Day.
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