Team Effort

Team Effort

Ryan and Heather Filippini go way back. They met as youngsters at St. Anne’s Catholic School in Lodi, followed separate paths to college, got reacquainted in Sacramento and married in 2010.

Now they work mostly from home. Ryan works in real estate. Heather works for a tech support company. East Sac is their base.

“Our first East Sac home was a two-bedroom, one-bath near Bertha Henschel Park,” Ryan says. “We then upgraded to a larger house across the street. We loved our neighbors and our tightknit neighborhood, especially during COVID lockdowns.”

Tailor Made

Tailor Made

Steve Benson, one of Sacramento’s finest and most beloved men’s clothing store owners, died in September from complications of the motor neuron disorder ALS, or Lou Gehrigs’s disease. He was 76.

Steve founded S. Benson & Co. fine men’s clothing in 1995. The East Sac shop was a high-end boutique with exceptional style and inventory.

Treasured for his old-school service, Steve was expert at custom-fitting clients or helping choose ready-to-wear apparel. Fathers and sons became generational clients.

Professional Help

Professional Help

Curtis Popp is a residential interior architectural designer. Over two decades, he established a reputation as a talented, creative and sought-after home design consultant.

Along the way, he found a side project, his family’s unconventional tri-level Land Park residence.

Popp grew up in Land Park. He and wife Sue, a nurse, were raising their two children there in a small, traditional house on Perkins Way.

But the interior designer couldn’t stop thinking about the nearby tri-level.

“One day, in the middle of the Great Recession, I saw a For Sale sign spring up on it,” Popp says. “The timing wasn’t good. And it took several visits to get Sue interested because the house at that time looked nothing like it does today.”

Design Minded

Design Minded

It’s not often a high-end retail store moves from the Bay Area to the Sacramento area. But the village of Fair Oaks is the new home to Terrestra, a destination for handcrafted home accessories.

After establishing locations in San Francisco and Mill Valley, Terrestra co-founders Amy Satran and Ray Kristof decided to downsize and move their gallery closer to the Sacramento home they purchased six years ago.

Satran and Kristof are a tech couple with backgrounds in multi-media. They met decades ago at Apple and started Terrestra in 2003. Today they consider themselves semi-retired in Fair Oaks Village while overseeing the gallery.

“Amy and I have always been collectors, and I grew up in France and enjoyed it from an early age,” Kristof says.

Decision Time

Decision Time

Inside publisher Cecily Hastings interviewed mayoral candidates Kevin McCarty and Flojaune Cofer, and recorded their responses to important questions facing the city. Interviews were separate, but both candidates responded to the same questions. Views on homelessness, business retention and Proposition 37 appeared in September editions of Inside Sacramento.

Anything’s Possible

Anything’s Possible

Monica Hernandez is proud of her hometown. She went to McClatchy High School, City College and Sacramento State. It’s no coincidence she and husband Kevin Flanagan ended up homeowners in Curtis Park.

Flanagan grew up near Monterey, attended Sac State and returned home after graduation. He met Hernandez a few years later. They were together for eight years before getting married in 2015.

“Our first house was much smaller and located in the Med Center neighborhood of Oak Park,” Hernandez says. “The house was built in 1914, and we took on many ‘old home’ projects as do-it-yourselfers in the 11 years we lived there.”

But the couple had grander plans.