John Curry and Janice Crow constantly evolve and recreate themselves, always with new goals and great ideas that emerge from some level of necessity.
Having emerged as an excellent home cook, John remembers his first “cooking experience” as sitting on the kitchen-counter near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, “stirring things for my mother, and running the Mixmaster—you know, the ones with the motor on the back.”

The same era leaves those of us who lived it with memories of pressure cookers spraying spinach all over our parents’ kitchen ceilings. Oh the wonders of invention!
John’s mother was an expert at creating culinary masterpieces of the time “out of nothing, with very little money.”

She cooked things like chuck roast, fresh vegetables, and green salads on a limited budget. John’s cooking life jumps to his art school days at the Columbus College of Art in Ohio, where he cooked to survive. Surviving to him focused on “pastas and tuna fish.”
Nothing special emerged from his kitchen until he and Janice met. She started to cook “because [he] thought it was [his] job.” When she would lament that “There’s nothing to cook, let’s go out,” John would look in the fridge and cabinet and make something from what was there.

He claims that ability goes back to necessity at art school. Of course, some of us would find ourselves frying canned cat food adorned with French’s mustard or oatmeal doused with catsup if left to similar resources.

John says he “would send Janice upstairs to watch the news so she wouldn’t see what I was putting in. We’d eat pretty good.”

While living in San Rafael in rental property, John and Texas native Janice focused on their arts of potting and watercolor, but couldn’t build a pottery on someone else’s property. They bought their current land down Broadway at “dead man’s curve” in 1976, wise folks that they were and are.
Where their Starwae Inn is now were “two dilapidated cottages,” called “Lilac Acres” because of the 60 lilac bushes and fruit trees already there. John and Janice lived in one house and turned the other into their dream; a place where John could throw all the pottery he wanted.
Their love of potting actually grew into a bustling business in which they employed eight people and sold tons of pottery to especially appreciative Japanese tourists at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite National Park.
John eventually handed over that contact to Sonoma potter Bev Prevost, who practices her art and craft at the LaHaye Art Centre on East Napa Street.
At first they were selling pots to eat, and even parked their old truck out on Highway 12 with a “Pine Springs Pottery” pots-for-sale sign, which attracted more garage-salers than pottery aficionados. At their potting peak, John and Janice had their work in galleries from Alaska to the Virgin Islands and Maine to San Diego.

Eventually the pottery employees felt it was time to move on, and so did John and Janice. In 1986 they had built a geodesic dome on their property to house John’s studio, as he was morphing into doing metal sculptures and Janice was getting deeper into watercolor.
Then, when the pottery studio broke up they converted the two little houses into a Bed & Breakfast, occupied occasionally by guests Judith and Bill Moyers, and ran that enterprise successfully for several years. The Moyers first stayed at Starwae when Sonoma’s Readers’ Books won Bill Moyers for a weekend in a national poetry event competition sponsored by his publisher.
Bed & Breakfast ownership is draining, to say the least, and the couple fanaticized about selling the whole place and running away to someplace better, an idea they shared with many friends at the time.

As happens with many of us who look for ever-pursued happiness on the other side of the fence, John and Janice realized there was really no place more beautiful that offered all their desired amenities than exactly where they were, right here in Sonoma.
The next morphication of the property continued into vacation rental sites, where John and Janice offer three suites and one queen size bedroom, all with private baths. Rates run from $1,600-$28,000 per month, with last minute weekend space available occasionally. All rooms are completely equipped for cooking, cable television, and telephones.

Janice created a series of paintings depicting her childhood and growing up (some of us are still working on that), and John suggested they make a book out of them with some of her writing and poetry. They self-published her book, I Give You My Word: A Journey to the Self Through Words and Watercolor” which is a beautiful book printed in Singapore.
John’s passion now is “making objects,” and apparently that includes good food. He philosophizes about the parallels between cooking pottery and cooking food.
He used to create “a recipe for a glaze for pottery, and might I might have been missing one ingredient, so I would fool around with the glaze recipe until I got what I wanted.” He adds that with pottery one has to stay more “on course with a glaze using exact measurements once I got the right recipes by experimenting. When I cook nothing is ever the same.” John may use the same ingredients, but he always experiments and the end result is often different.

By stroke of great luck or inevitability, John McReynolds, who now co-owns Café LaHaye, stayed at Starwae for a week when he and his wife Brigitte, returned to California from Germany. John McReynolds offered to cook dinner, continued nightly for their whole stay, and John Curry got to hang at McReynolds elbow and learn, learn, learn. McReynolds taught Curry the importance of stainless steel, what different pans are for, and the value of “cooking ingredients separately and then combining them at the end so that flavors stay unique to what they were.”

Currently John is experimenting with his computer, creating digital collages, and using a Painter program that he learned to master at the Santa Rosa Junior College’s Petaluma campus. Janice continues to do some painting, but mainly works on their new venture of hosting workshops.

John and Janice are holding a series of writing workshops, featuring many of the same presenters the Sonoma Writers’ Group hosted five or so years ago, with all-day workshops and lunches cooked by John. San Francisco literary agents and authors Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada will give lots of tips this Saturday at Starwae, all for $195.

Attendees will enjoy endless food. Wisely, John offers foods “that won’t put people to sleep,” and cooks “protein, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and very little starch.” They use serving dishes made by John, and Epicurious got to taste the workshop vittles on Dixie paper plates with blue rims.