Molly Sedlacek

Molly Sedlacek
Landscape Designer
Fairfax, CA

For landscape designer Molly Sedlacek, the answer has always been in nature. Yet much like Joni Mitchell observes in her song “Woodstock,” the journey has been about remembering where we began…about getting ourselves “back to the garden.”

As a kid on the Oregon Coast, Molly’s childhood was intrinsically intertwined with the specificity of place — the daughter of a landscape designer and a Forest Service Ranger, life as a family was experienced through the lens of the seasons, with Molly’s senses awakened inside the Pacific Northwest’s rich dampness, cracking wind, and carpeted moss.

As an adult, Molly moved to San Francisco where she built a career in sustainable textile design while still craving a closer intimacy with and proximity to nature. Designing a compact outdoor plot in her Outer Sunset neighborhood, she spent weekends and spare time with hands in the earth — subconsciously chipping away at what would become the footprint for a greater working ethos. Amid the first days of the pandemic’s lockdown, her intuition triggered a loud and clear sign — it was time to make a change. Picking up her city life, she left for Marin County and embraced the risk of what it meant to purposely deconstruct the layers of a carefully constructed existence.

The metaphor was almost too clear: the answer was in starting from the ground up, literally in the dirt. Leasing a second-floor apartment above a café in downtown Fairfax, she converted the space into a working studio and let her proverbial inner compass lead.

Over the last few years, this intuition has given way to OR.CA, a landscape design firm grounded in a distinctly undone philosophy. At once nurturing native flora within fixed environments and embracing a foundational wildness, its namesake is an homage to Oregon and California—the two landscapes that have influenced her most profoundly. Today, the small studio designs everything from residential gardens to large-scale installations to pieces furniture meant for outdoor use (often repurposed from salvaged bits of materials she comes across on job sites, like oversized planters made from hollowed burls or stools cut from unused scraps of redwood).

—
Full story available in Making Sense Vol. 1 Book


Making Sense is a publication series with Le Labo Fragrances that is a study in distilling life to its essence, as told through the stories of 12 individual who have fearlessly hand-crafted lives of their own making.

Read more about the series here.