California, street by street.

California is too big to write all at once, so we didn't try. We started in Los Angeles, where thirteen shops now sit on this map, and where — despite everything you've heard about the driving — the best of them still cluster close enough to walk. Three of the thirteen are on one stretch of Beverly Boulevard: Garde and Nickey Kehoe for the home things, and the Heath Ceramics showroom, open seven days a week, in between.

The furniture is west of there and easy to pair — Croft House on North La Brea, built in the California idiom, and Lawson-Fenning's showroom on Melrose. The clay is the other direction: POT on West Jefferson Boulevard, Sooki Studio & Supply out in Frogtown by the river, both working studios rather than showrooms. Plants make their own little run, Mickey Hargitay on North Sycamore and Potted on Los Feliz Boulevard, and Now Serving keeps the cookbooks and kitchen things off North Broadway in Chinatown.

The two you drive furthest for are worth it. Olive Ateliers on Mateo Street in the Arts District, all antiques and vintage furniture at a scale that makes a warehouse feel right, and Tortoise General Store on Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista, on the west side, which is the general store as an idea taken seriously. And on Wednesday mornings there's the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Arizona Avenue — year-round, which is the thing the northern states can't do.

We haven't stood inside every door on this list. Where we haven't, we say so on the shop's page. Nobody paid to be here. San Francisco, the valleys, and the coast towns come next, slowly, the way we add anything.