What’s Happening: More than a decade ago, the Denver Housing Authority embarked on an ambitious redevelopment plan for Sun Valley, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. With construction scheduled through 2025, and 80 percent of the original residents displaced into other neighborhoods, what’s the value of the yet-to-be-completed utopic vision?

The Download: Neighborhood rebranding can be contentious. It’s often seen as a bellwether of gentrification: everyone from big tech to real-estate developers have gotten side-eye for abruptly renaming longstanding enclaves in a corporatized image that best serves their commercial interests. Local governments can, and often do, join residents in refusing to use increasingly bewildering names that seem to have been spit out by chatbots. ProCro, Rambo, and BaCoCa are a handful of real-world examples of the phenomenon that’s been parodied by It’s Always Sunny and even Tina Fey’s Baby Mama. But for Sun Valley, which the Denver Housing Authority calls the city’s “poorest neighborhood,” a $240 million redevelopment will see the community retain its name but deploy a shiny rebrand as part of a revitalization effort.

Sun Valley is home to Denver’s first public housing project. After the neighborhood was rezoned for industrial use in 1925, its residential blocks fell into disrepair before being transformed into public housing as part of the original New Deal. Rail lines, highways, and a sharp economic divide—more than 80 percent of residents live below the poverty line—separate Sun Valley from Denver proper. The housing authority set out to demolish the outdated infrastructure in 2010 to build a mix of new “subsidized and free-market housing.” Additional improvements include “a public park, a community garden, a community-operated supermarket, and a job training center,” all anchored by a new brand identity and wayfinding system developed by local studio Wunder Werkz.

No-nonsense and data-driven solutions, like signage with text in English and Spanish, along with universal symbols to account for the 21 other languages spoken in the community, all sound good on paper. But factor in reality: The redevelopment, which began in 2010, is still ongoing. To date, only two apartment buildings, the grocery store, and the community garden have been completed, and a mere 20 percent of displaced Sun Valley residents have been able to return, with a projected completion date of Q3, 2025. Reactions to the project have been mixed. Wunder Werkz acknowledges the impact of the community’s participation in the democratic design process, but some lament the yearslong loss of block parties and communal holiday celebrations synonymous with the neighborhood they had come to love. Others fear a future of gentrification—and one in which they’re priced out of accessible grocery stores.

In their Own Words: In an interview with Collective Colorado, 23-year-old Sun Valley resident Selena Ramirez recounted being displaced from her neighborhood in 2018 due to construction. “This is where you’ve grown up your whole life and you want to hold on to that,” she said. “All these changes are happening around you, and you see it happening in other neighborhoods and it feels like gentrification.” She now manages the community’s grocery store, and has seen a slow and steady resurgence firsthand: “It’s different, but it’s grown on me.”

Surface Says: We can’t really say whether a glossy rebrand will measurably improve life in Sun Valley, but exposing uninhabitable public housing conditions is something we can get behind.

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On the heels of its launch in London, Dorsia is heading to San Francisco & Wine Country. Download and apply for exclusive access to hotspots like Rich Table, Octavia, Frances The Cavalier, Saison, and more. Dorsia is a members-only platform with coveted reservations at the most in-demand restaurants in New York, Miami, L.A., The Hamptons, London, and San Francisco, with more markets coming soon.

Since opening in 2021, The Four Seasons Resort and Residences Napa Valley continues to make headlines. From its coveted perch on Calistoga Road, Napa’s Main Street of top-tier wineries, the property has accrued multiple accolades. It’s the region’s only resort located on a working vineyard, Thomas Rivers Brown’s Elusa Winery, the industry’s top maker of Cabernet Sauvignons. The 85 rooms on the 22-acre grounds offer sweeping vineyard views and visages of Mount Saint Helena on the horizon. This summer, chef Rogelio Garcia’s seasonal tasting menus at onsite restaurant Auro were recognized with a Michelin star.

Come fall, the hotel will serve as a base camp for a weeklong whirlwind tour of the region’s top food and wine destinations. The Four Seasons Drive Experience Napa Valley gives discerning clientele entry to some of the most exclusive vineyards and culinary farms, many of which either book up months in advance or simply don’t open their doors to the public. Expect a crash course in sportscars and choose from a fleet of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Aston Martins, and Bentleys courtesy of Italian racing and touring company Canossa. In true California car-culture style, those on the tour get to experience the joys of driving through canyons and the bluffs of the historic Pacific Coast Highway.

In 1953, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated two stained glass windows honoring Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson to the Washington National Cathedral. Designed by Boston artist Wilbur H. Burnham, the windows depict both Confederate generals as Christian crusaders alongside images of the Confederate flag. In the wake of the 2015 massacre of nine Black members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the cathedral’s then-dean Gary Hall called for their removal. “Simply put, these windows were offensive,” current dean Randolph Marshall Hollerith said in a statement. “They were antithetical to our call to be a house of prayer for all people.”

The cathedral’s administration formed a task force to determine the windows’ future and, in 2021, selected artist Kerry James Marshall to envision the new panes. His windows, titled Now and Forever and installed in two adjacent bays, were dedicated over the weekend with support from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. They depict a crowd of Black demonstrators holding signs that read “no foul play” and “fairness,” portraying the ongoing march toward equality and justice. “[Pieces of art] can invite us and anybody who sees them to reflect on the propositions they present, and to imagine oneself as a subject and an author of a never-ending story that has yet to be told,” Marshall said in a statement. “This is what I tried to do, with words, images, and colored glass, for right here and right now.”

In 2021, Studio SFW partners Rachael Stollar, Erin Fearins, and Ward Welch closed one chapter of their careers as colleagues at a New York architecture and design firm as they left to open their own studio. In the intervening years, the trio has expanded their client base beyond the tri-state area and has thrown open the doors to their retail enterprise, House SFW, located in Upstate New York. In the studio’s latest venture, Stoller, Fearins, and Welch are consulting on the design of a yet-to-be-revealed “agricultural, hospitality, and entertainment destination” in the Appalachian Highlands of Tennessee.

Hotels started experimenting with automation to operate with leaner staffing models during the pandemic, but those temporary band-aids—self-service kiosks, bartending robots—are replacing thousands of jobs. The hospitality industry currently employs 238,000 fewer people than in pre-Covid times, and experts anticipate that number will only increase. That may spell trouble for Las Vegas, where one in four residents are employed in the hospitality sector. There, roughly 17,000 people are without jobs, a staggering 6.1 percent unemployment rate and the highest among major U.S. metropolitan areas. Distrust of new technology and belt-tightening measures may prompt the first citywide strike in nearly 40 years for the Culinary Workers Union, where contracts for 40,000 members recently expired.

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Synonymous with French taste and style without ostentation, based on exceptional expertise and furnishing design, Liaigre is a house of creation whose value proposition lies in simplicity, quality, balance, and beauty. The brand has been designing and creating spaces and furnishings for more than 30 years and is represented in showrooms around the world and three offices in Paris, New York, and Bangkok.

Surface Says: To this day, Liaigre embodies its founder’s timeless elegance with a deft eye for contemporary art, furnishings, and interior styling.

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