David Oorbeck, a self-taught weaver and clothing designer, is showing his visitors a handsome sweater with quite a literal pedigree, if you love dogs. “One of my clients, a lovely lady in Marin, had a Samoyed she loved very much,” he explains, beaming because he loves the story. “She groomed him every day since she was a child. And when the dog died a couple of decades ago, she had it sheared and saved the hair. Then she had it spun into yarn. And that’s what I used to weave this sweater.”
This coat was made for a client with the hair of her late
Samoyed. (Photo courtesy of Dro & Tsutomu Designs)
Oorbeck and his business and life partner, Tsutomu Kanaya, have a new retail space at 1021 R St., Suite 106, in the brick building of studios and shops known as Arthouse on R. Their store is called Dro & Tsutomu Designs.
For Kanaya, handcrafting — including jewelry, scarves and patchwork quilts — is, he says, “a form of meditation.” Growing up in Fukuoka, Japan’s sixth-largest city, he credits his mother, who was well known in her region for creating handsewn kimonos, for his gentle, positive artistry — adjectives that may sound surprising when you learn that she hailed from a family of samurai, the country’s traditional warrior class.
A couple since 1996, Oorbeck and Kanaya plied their art on a consignment basis in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, a bastion of boutiques and studios that was laid low by the COVID pandemic. Coming out of that short but deadly era, Oorbeck says the two decided to open their own store. But the rent being asked, even after COVID closed so many places, was “ridiculous.”
He says that some artist friends of theirs told them about Sacramento — that it was affordable and contained consumers “as attracted to creativity as in the Bay Area.”
Tsutomu Kanaya displays one of his obsidian necklaces. (Photo by
Cynthia J. Larsen)
The store also sells handmade jewelry, featuring gemstones, beads and obsidian necklaces. Oorbeck and Kanaya opened their store only a few months ago and already have been commissioned to do some large-scale works, like carpets.
“We’re not putting on a huge storefront or showroom,” says Oorbeck, the boisterous Penn to Kanaya’s soft-spoken Teller. “But we love explaining what we do to people.”
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