Norm Applebaum
architect

There’s nothing funny, however, about Applebaum’s homes, which have all but defined contemporary San Diego residential architecture for 38 years. When the nation’s pre-eminent architectural photographer, Julius Shulman, toured Applebaum’s Suncatch residence in Rancho Santa Fe in 2005, he told the architect, “This is the finest house in the world. Your genius is beyond words.”

Robert Wright
interior designer

Ask Robert Wright for his favorite interior design projects and his answer reveals not only his views on good design but also something about what he values in life.
In naming two of his three favorite projects, he emphasized the close relationships he formed with the clients as much or more than the projects themselves — though each one is superb. For the third favorite, he chose a 1999 Interiors of the Year Grand Prize award that he won from this magazine.

Takendo Arii
garden designer

Japan is wet and mossy; California is dry and rocky. So how do you create a Japanese garden in Southern California’s dry chaparral? “You water the rocks,” says Takendo Arii, who designed the gardens at Escondido’s Golden Door spa.

Irina Gronborg
botanical artist

A plant carefully observed, with all its efflorescent individuality bursting into bloom, inevitable bug bites and beetle holes, and then its withering leaves and faded blossoms, poses for its portrait. One of the most magical practitioners of the art of observing plants and flowers is botanical artist Irina Gronborg, who has come to be known nationally over the past decades for her pencil drawings. Readers of this magazine first were introduced to her art with colored pencil in our pages from 1984 to 1990.

Arline Fisch
jewelry artist

It has been a long time since jewelry artist or designer craftsman was sufficient to describe the exceptional creativity and body of work of Arline Fisch. In more than 55 years of working and teaching, she has taken her craft down untold avenues of inspired innovation and global networking. It’s hard to imagine how one woman could have accomplished so much in little more than half a century.

Ernest Silva
painter and sculptor

Conversations flow easily in the presence of Silva’s supple and elegant paintings, many of which reflect man’s relationship with nature, or, on a more personal level, memories of his youth in New England. Silva was born in Providence and attended the University of Rhode Island, where he received his BFA prior to earning an MFA at Temple University in Philadelphia. His paintings, he says, are “based on living experiences that are common denominators to a lot of people.”

Deanne Sabeck
glass artist

After 36 years working with glass and how it plays with light, Sabeck today is consumed with her meditation regimen through disciplined Ashtanga yoga sessions outside her studio home, and in the study of tantric philosophy. It’s a natural pairing to provide the creative energy needed for her work on major glass art installations as well as smaller pieces — wall or window mounted or suspended — that are suitable for residences.

Laird Plumleigh
ceramicist

Behind Laird Plumleigh’s soft-spoken mod- esty is an explosion of ideas. Projects underway at his Leucadia studio give visitors a vivid indication of the serious range and depth of his work. Plumleigh’s ceramics appear in books and magazines like California Romantica, W, Traditional Home and American Bungalow. They grace the Malibu homes of celebrities Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand. Striking public fountains at the University of San Diego and Plaza de Panama and the restoration of the Alcazar Gardens in Balboa Park have stamped his signature on the face of San Diego.

Del Cover
woodworker

There’s a reason woodworker Del Cover’s Best of Show is among his favorite pieces. The functional artwork, which also is a cabinet with drawers, shows off the fact that Cover can do just about anything with wood — marquetry, trim molding, relief carving, inlay. It also boasts his creative talents. Like a Picasso vision, the extraordinary arrangement of the leftover wood —from thousands of scrap pieces from furniture and artwork done over many years of woodworking — is something to behold.

Hans Liebscher
coppersmith

"One machine can do the work of 50 ordi- nary men,” wrote the American philosopher/author Elbert Hubbard. “No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” Hubbard wasn’t talking about Hans Liebscher, but had he known this coppersmith from San Marcos — who still employs the anvil and hammer in the way of the 4,000-year-old tradition — he might have mentioned him.