The Fine Print
When Portia De Rossi left acting and Los Angeles behind, she focused her energy on life in Montecito and pursuing her new business, General Public, making art more accessible for everyone
Written by Christine Lennon | Photographs by Dewey Nicks
It’s clear that something interesting is happening inside a renovated factory building in downtown Carpinteria, even from the sidewalk. The exterior, which has been spruced up with a fresh coat of greige paint and black metal barn lights, is spare and signless like a hidden art gallery. But if you listen carefully, you can hear the electronic hum of large equipment inside. It could be a factory, an artist’s studio, or a modern technology hub.
Or, as the current tenant Portia de Rossi will explain, it’s all three of those concepts at once. The building is the new main office and manufacturing center of General Public—the company that she founded with her brother, Michael Rogers. They’re using 3D printing technology to produce textured art prints called synographs, which are available through the Restoration Hardware website.
“There’s a huge gap in the market between fine art and decorative art,” says de Rossi, who raises her voice to be heard over the noise of the room-size scanners and printers. The framing team is stretching canvases onto wooden frames in another section of the 20,000-square-foot space with unfinished concrete floors and exposed rafters. “If you’re buying art on a budget, you just end up with black squiggles on a piece of paper,” she says. “People know good art and composition, truly, but they don’t trust their instincts. And almost all original art is still very expensive. The whole market can be very difficult.”
Her personal taste leans to the abstract, like this Study of Pilings 11 by Charlie Leal.
The 47-year-old former actress seems entirely in her element, discussing how many tiff files the scanner has to produce to replicate the look and feel of thick paint on a canvas, conveying the “information you get from a brushstroke” in a way that traditional prints cannot. “It’s like we’re creating a topographical map,” she says, clearly delighted that she and her tech team devised a way to create an entirely new category in the art world. It’s a licensing model. Artists submit their work to the site for consideration. A team of curators chooses which artist they work with, who then send in their paintings to be scanned and reproduced. The work is returned in a couple of weeks like nothing ever happened. Artists are free to sell and show their work, and they receive royalties based on sales of the paintings, which de Rossi calls “mailbox money.” Their best-selling artist has received $90,000 in royalties.
“This is all technology that existed before, but our team found a way for the software—between the scanner and the printer—to communicate in a way that they hadn’t before. Essentially, it’s just sprayed ink on a canvas, but we just tricked the printer into going over the same surface over and over. When we started the company, the thought was, If we can 3D-print a table, how can we not 3D-print a painting?”
On a skateboard, Tramontin used spray paint and his own hands while moving back and forth along the cement block wall.
“Artists, sculptors, musicians, actors are all expressing their experience of life, and the beauty of doing that is that you get to connect with other people, and other people understand your perspective. Being able to share your work is everything.”
De Rossi and her wife, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, have been fixtures in the Santa Barbara area since 2005, when they bought their first in a series of homes in Montecito, on Ashley Road. De Rossi, a native Australian, was drawn to the horse-country lifestyle and the casual small-town atmosphere, whereas DeGeneres had discovered the city when she performed her stand-up comedy at The Arlington Theatre and dreamed of owning a house here. Busy work schedules in Los Angeles meant that the couple—who have become well-known for their exquisite taste and for buying and renovating architecturally interesting homes—was torn about how to split their time. Just last year, they worked out a plan: De Rossi is at their home in Montecito nearly full-time, working at General Public, and DeGeneres is there Wednesday night to Monday morning.
The couple has developed a shorthand for designing their homes. De Rossi is the expert with light and space, following her instincts about how to organize furniture in a room, or how to make a floor plan more conducive to living. “But don’t ask me to pick out a textile,” she laughs. “And Ellen is the one who’s in charge of furniture.”
De Rossi—who’s leaning casually on a Jean Prouvé antique desk she brought into the office from her home—says that Restoration Hardware was the ideal partner to sell General Public synographs because “the aesthetic of the brand is very similar to mine.” An RH cocktail table and sofa mix perfectly with her own vintage furniture. Textured prints from General Public artists, like the Sallie White It Wasn’t All That print hanging on the wall, are stacked throughout the space. Set styled by Kyle Irwin/
Field + Fort.
DeGeneres is an informed collector of midcentury French furniture and lighting from designers such as Jean Prouvé and Jean Royère. She has bought and renovated dozens of homes in her lifetime, hiring a top team of interior consultants and landscape architects like Clements Design, Cliff Fong, and Mark Rios to collaborate on restorations. In the process of decorating and living in a number of houses over the years, de Rossi came to understand how challenging it can be to pull together an art collection that reflects one’s style and taste, especially on a budget. When she decided to stop acting back in 2017, she was searching for a new project, and the dots started to connect. She approached her brother, Michael, who she describes as a “tech guy,” with the inkling of an idea. And they took the leap together.
Now, her refined but edgy aesthetic is writ large over the General Public office space. De Rossi has a Prouvé desk in her personal office, mixed with a rust-colored velvet RH sofa, some shearling upholstered chairs, and a Royère floor lamp. She commissioned Nicholas Tramontin—a General Public artist in residence—to create a dynamic mural on a low concrete wall, which he created on a skateboard with dozens of cans of spray paint. And her SAG award is affixed to the top of a $1 million printer.
When de Rossi first saw the former lemon-packing factory in Carpinteria, it was like “light beams were shooting out of it,” she says. The 20,000-square-foot building has enough floor space to house enormous equipment, such as a super-sensitive scanner.
By any measure, the life de Rossi and DeGeneres have built for themselves seems to check all of the right boxes. De Rossi walks across the street to ride two of her retired horses every day at lunch. She brings her dogs to the office and takes regular business meetings on the beach, which is just a block away. “I wanted to have a workplace where everyone was happy. And we have that here. We can see the ocean from our front door,” she says.
“It’s small-town living, but it’s so sophisticated. And we have a great community of friends,” says de Rossi, who is a regular at Field + Fort, the new cafe and shop in Summerland owned by their friend and designer Kyle Irwin, who is working with the couple on another house project. And every day, she does what she loves: being in nature and “creating a platform for painters to put their work out into
the world.
As the founder and CEO of the business, de Rossi has discovered that she loves the art of the sales pitch. “Every day, my brother comes in and says, ‘No more!’ But I’ve been working on accounts for two years. I can’t say no! We’re growing so fast,” she says. Here, she’s posed in front of a Jason Adkins synograph, Blurskopple for General Public.
“Artists, sculptors, musicians, actors are all expressing their experience of life, and the beauty of doing that is that you get to connect with other people, and other people understand your perspective. Being able to share your work is everything.
“That’s what art does. It elevates people. It connects people,” she continues. “And it’s really a lovely thing that we get to introduce all of these new artists—from Belgium, Italy, Canada, or wherever—and I get to share those folks with people who live in Carpinteria. And then all over the country.” •
Hair by Laini Reeves. Makeup by Heather Currie for Cloutier Remix. Styled by Kellen Richards.
