Chris Smith: Valley fire sparks Middletown native’s interior design project

Samantha Millard-McEvoy wasn’t home last fall when the Valley fire incinerated a vast swath of southern Lake County.

She was off studying interior design at West Virginia University. But she came back to Middletown and she was horrified, and also inspired, by what she saw.

“A lot of my friends lost their homes and the town seriously looked like the apocalypse, everything scorched black and destroyed,” she said.

“I was driving around looking at the remains of all these houses and all you see is bent steel scattered around concrete foundations with brick chimneys still standing proudly in the center of what was very recently someone’s home.”

What Samantha saw ended her search for a design concept to develop and submit to a national competition.

The 21-year-old’s conceptual design, “Rebuilding Community,” won an Interior Design Educators Council regional award.

It envisions a new gathering space built of fire-resistant steel, concrete and brick, and incorporating material salvaged from the fire, either as construction components or repurposed into art.

The Middletown center would start out as a place where fire victims could come to engage with professional and student architects and designers on how to replace their lost homes or businesses with highly efficient, durable, beautiful new structures that if possible would retain remnants of those that were destroyed.

Samantha’s concept is just that, but it’s a good one. So, who will build it?

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THE FINAL FLIGHT by what’s described as one sweet 1978 four-engine Lockheed JetStar business jet will bring it pretty soon to Sonoma County.

Aviation buffs will want to be at the county airport for its arrival because it will be historic.

The owner of the JetStar, a precursor of the Learjet and all other business jets, has anonymously donated it to the Pacific Coast Air Museum, which resides at the airport and hosts the annual Wings Over Wine Country air show.

The 10-seat JetStar won’t fly again after its arrival here, but it will be displayed prominently and visitors to PCAM will be able to sit in it, and imagine.

As soon as I know when it will arrive, you’ll know.

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BORN IN MEXICO, Maria de Los Angeles was brought by her parents to Sonoma County, where she grew into an artist.

I’ve tried to follow Maria as she studied at Elsie Allen and Santa Rosa High, went on to SRJC, then was accepted at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then earned a master of fine arts degree at Yale.

On Friday from 5 to 7 p.m., she’ll be in the council chambers at Santa Rosa City Hall for the opening reception of a solo exhibit that will be on display there through June 2.

Maria says springtime, roses and her experiences as an undocumented resident inspired the colorful, evocative, sometimes haunting pieces that she created on coarse linen. She invites us to City Hall on Friday to see and talk about her art and the realities it explores.

Also: Maria is collecting used quinceañera dresses for an art project that will interpret “cultural traditions and how we modify them or keep them in the face of migration and cultural assimilation.”

She’d love to hear from you at mdlafineart@gmail.com if you’ve got a lead on a quinceañera dress.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.