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-Makers who invent things from a place of love
and a place of passion and a place of inspiration
is about as good as it gets.
The more stories I hear, the more I travel,
I am drawn to those types of people
and to those types of stories.
I want to encourage other people to find that same place,
and to build from there.
I think it's a wave of the future.
I think it's as cool as it gets.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CALVIN ZARA: I have a secret garden that
inspires makers of the future.
I remember, like, in the streets of Baghdad, my brother and I,
Adam, we would create things.
That and watching my parents being very creative,
taking things that were nothing and turning them into something
that was useful and beautiful.
You know, my blueprint has been that.
I don't think I had a choice.
I think it just came natural, and what I saw
and what I needed to do.
My blueprint has been my mom taking rags literally
from second-hand stores and buying the best material,
but maybe it has a hole in it, and buying a big jacket
that she would cut and recut and remake
into something beautiful.
So I grew up in things that were so beautiful and so
minimalistic, but had a lot of character and warmth to it.
And that's what I'm constantly duplicating.
I think it's just been my experience, has been my path
that I had the fortune to travel on.
I was fortunate when I was 16 years old.
I was sent to Greece, and the job I landed
was in a carpentry shop.
They'd tell me never to touch a thing.
I work extra hard, I impress them, they leave me alone.
So when they leave occasionally to go deliver
a piece of furniture they'd finished to a client,
I would take it upon myself to go and cut and do things.
And they would come back and they
were screaming at me, like, we told you not
to touch that machine.
You cannot cut anything.
I was like, I'm sorry.
And after a while, they're like, OK, fine,
you can do it, but be very careful.
It afforded me a skill that I didn't know.
Nowadays, when I see beautiful wood
that I'm salvaging from a cottage or siding that
is thick wood that's like 120 years old,
I don't have the heart to throw it out,
so I turn it into a table like that, or the dining room
tables in gathering rooms, or a bookcase or something else.
So we were living in Beverly Hills.
And Sophia was 14.
And it was around April-- she had not turned 14 yet--
and I just all of a sudden-- I mean,
we were pretty happy in Beverly Hills, and all of a sudden,
I don't know why, it just hit me like a brick wall,
like, wait a second, she's going to high school,
and she's going to go to Beverly Hills High.
And I just freaked out, like I don't think I want to do that.
So we started looking at properties.
And we visited a few places, and Ojai just made sense.
One of my reasons that made it easier was the property
had three or four rentals on it.
And I thought, why not, it's just
helping the mortgage payment.
So we had those renters that we inherited for about a year.
One of them moved a year after, and I started fixing the place
and had kind of been bit by the renovation bug.
So I started fixing it, and I fixed it like too well.
And after fixing it, I started putting nice furniture in it,
and I'm like, I don't think I want a permanent renter here.
So the whole idea of maybe a vacation rental or weekends
here and there, then it just one thing led to another,
and here we are with goats, chicken, turkey and sheep.
We make everything almost here on the property,
from cheese, yogurt, eggs fresh from our chicken coop to milk
and everything else in between.
Just living here, it just was more organic.
That was just the way-- the way it grew.
Like, the goats are here because we're lactose intolerant,
my son and I are lactose intolerant.
Sophia has allergies.
And we'd done some research, and the goat milk
was like the best thing we've done to cure her allergies.
Same thing with the chicken, from the meat to the vegetables
to the herbs, and making as much as we can.
We're not self-sustained 100%, but we're pretty close.
It's a secret garden.
One of the reasons I wanted to offer it
to people that want to come to it because they want
to see something that would give them the reason to change
something in their diet, their life, their stress
level, whatever it is.
Obviously, the farm things have to be done.
You can't afford to just sit down and do nothing.
If I want milk, I have to get up at 5 o'clock, 5:30 or 6:00,
and go milk and clean the barn and filter the milk.
I don't just, like, open a bottle and just drink milk.
So you have to get up early in the morning
because the animals will be, like, going crazy if you
don't get them out of the barn.
If you don't milk them, the young ones
are going to milk them for you, and you're
going to have no milk.
When you milk, you have to make something out of it,
because after two or three days-- this is fresh milk,
it's raw milk.
You have to turn it into something.
So you have to turn it into yogurt, turn it into cheeses,
or drink it.
The garden, obviously, if you don't tend to it,
it's just going to become a weed haven.
And the same thing with the trees.
You have to tend to them, if it's a tree that's crooked
or if the water is not watering properly.
So you have to do all those chores
because you have no choice.
This is my own quiet movement to say, you know,
where I don't want to preach to people,
I want to just do it and lead by example.
And people come and take whatever
they think they need out of it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]