Our story

About Chris and Anne.

These are homes we live in and work on ourselves, in places we know well.

Stay Close is a 1935 Wrightsville Beach cottage that Chris rebuilt with his father. In Healdsburg, Chris and Anne restored a cabin above Mill Creek and named it Cosmico. They spent Harper’s early years in Todos Santos, where Casa del Arte began as a sculptor’s home and studio. These are our family homes. We keep what works, fix what does not, and rely on local people who know each house well.

Dusk over the Pacific from Casa del Arte

We live here

Cosmico on Mill Creek is home, we spent our daughter's early years living in Todos Santos, and we love summer in Wrightsville. These are the places where our own meals, friends, and family time happen through the year.

Living in a house tells you what it needs—what to keep, what to fix, where a chair or a painting belongs. We keep working on each home between stays, so they’re lived-in and ready when you arrive.

Chris and Anne together at sunset on the rooftop at Casa del Arte, among friends

Creative life

Music, writing, and photography

Songwriters and musicians have written and recorded in these homes. A quiet room, time outside, and no schedule tend to help.

Most days are simpler than that: reading, cooking, working, or walking outside.

Album cover for Andrew Duhon's Emerald Blue — a torn photographic collage of a figure standing in a creek among boulders — Andrew Duhon’s *Emerald Blue* — photographed in Mill Creek below our homes.

A turntable and records in a corner of the house at Casa del Arte

In conversation

Around the houses

Music and the work around it

Chris and Anne run Analog Reunion, a music festival in Sonoma County. Their work often brings musicians, writers, and friends to these houses.

Chris is also the author of Analog: How to Love Your Work, and Not Wait for Retirement to Live the Good Life.

The creekside deck at Cosmico under the redwoods

Chris, Anne, and Harper at Analog Reunion — an ordinary moment from the life around the houses — Chris, Anne, and Harper at Analog Reunion.

Chris and his father in work aprons inside the Stay Close cottage during the build — Chris and his father, building Stay Close.

Where it began

Built as a family.

Chris’s father, a master carpenter, restored the 1935 cottage at Wrightsville Beach with the family alongside him. Chris learned the work there, and he and Anne have kept at it since—at Mill Creek and in Todos Santos.

These photographs show some of that work, and the houses as we've found and changed them.

Come on up to the creek

Cosmico · Healdsburg · 2017–2020

Anne at work in the unfinished kitchen at Cosmico, 2017 — Anne in the kitchen, mid-build · 2017

A handwritten deck plan for Cosmico drawn on graph paper — The deck, worked out on graph paper

Anne and Harper in the creek beneath the Starlight Grove treehouse, 2020 — Anne and Harper at the creek, beneath the Starlight Grove treehouse · 2020

Cover of the book Analog by Chris Schultz

From Analog

A passage about finding Cosmico

In the spring of 2017, Anne and I bought a cabin in a redwood grove right on Mill Creek in the wine country of Healdsburg, California.
But the cabin hadn’t been lived in for two years. Except for the critters. The carpet was moldy. The deck was falling apart.
The fact that it needed a lot of work reminded me of my days spent with Dad rebuilding the cottage in North Carolina. We began weekend projects ourselves for the first few months. We spent days steaming off wallpaper, then made design changes and decided to tear that wall down anyway. The demolition process is fun because you get to swing sledgehammers and pull cabinets out with crowbars. With cabinets and drywall everywhere, the demolition zone was a real mess. But we loved every minute of it. We were making progress.

— Chris Schultz, Analog

Read Analog →