Santa Barbara style is often described in soft language: white walls, ocean light, Spanish lines, linen, oak, restraint. And all of that is true. But there is another current running through the Central Coast, one with more grit, color, humor, and nerve.
Joanna "Bea" Shultz lives comfortably in that current.
Her pieces have polish, but they also have attitude, the sense that a home can be elegant without losing its pulse.
The founder of Bea Furnishings, Shultz is an upholsterer, fabric obsessive, maker, and designer whose work sits somewhere between craft and art. Her pieces are tactile and precise, but rarely timid. They carry the confidence of someone who understands a room does not become interesting by looking like every other room.
Raised in Solvang, Shultz studied interior design in Santa Barbara and San Francisco before following upholstery across the country, including time in North Carolina, New York, and Denver. She eventually returned to Santa Barbara and founded Bea Furnishings as a service-based upholstery business. Today, her work ranges from antique reupholstery and custom cushions to pieces made with rare vintage deadstock fabrics.
For Shultz, leaving and coming back only sharpened what was already there.
"I feel incredibly fortunate to have been raised in Solvang," she says, "and I often say that the 805 is the foundation of how I create today."
She sees the Central Coast as a study in contrast: the dry golden fields of the Santa Ynez Valley, weathered gray oaks, lush coastal mountains, and the crisp white architecture of Santa Barbara. Those landscapes should compete, but somehow they belong together.
"Living between the valley's rustic patina and Santa Barbara's coastal sophistication taught me to appreciate the beauty of unexpected pairings," she says.
That idea explains much of Bea Furnishings. Shultz gravitates toward things that shouldn't work together on paper: old frames in new fabrics, a practical piece with an expressive streak, a shape that's refined right up until it isn't. A vintage chair, reupholstered in something it was never meant to wear, ends up looking less like furniture and more like a decision someone made on purpose.
Her first true masterwork started as trash. Shultz rescued a sofa, quite literally, from a dumpster, and rebuilt it into the piece that's since become something like her calling card — proof, in her own words, that something written off as finished can usually still be saved.
Even the name Bea has roots more personal than most people would guess. It isn't a persona she invented — it's her own middle name, Beatrice, given to her at birth after her grandmother, Beatrice Joan. As a teenager, Shultz became obsessed with thrift shopping in downtown Solvang. She began buying vintage finds and marking them with "Bea" using bleach, spray paint, and handmade paper stencils. Over time, the name became a signature, and going by Bea professionally today feels like growing into a name she'd been carrying since birth.
At the center of her work is devotion to the trade itself. Upholstery is often misunderstood as simply recovering furniture. In reality, it is a rare and demanding craft built through years of hands-on experience.
"Every piece that leaves my studio has passed through my own hands," she says, "and that direct connection to the work is something I value deeply."
That matters in an era when furniture can feel anonymous, and many design services are bundled beneath larger firms. Shultz hopes people will keep things a little more "old school," asking who is actually making the pieces they bring into their homes.
Her vintage fabrics are another form of rescue. Shultz works with deadstock textiles from the 1960s and 1970s, fabrics she describes as a chapter of textile history that simply is not being made anymore. Their weight, color, and weave bring something newer, mass-produced textiles often cannot.
"I believe throw pillows are the earrings of a room," she says. "They have the opportunity to be bold, playful, complementary, and deeply personal."
It's a perfect Bea line: practical, stylish, a little mischievous, and completely true. A pillow, in her hands, is an invitation to take a risk most people wouldn't take on their own.
That risk is part of what makes Shultz's work feel so right for Santa Barbara now. Not the postcard version of Santa Barbara, but the one locals recognize: creative, layered, rebellious, and full of people who know beauty can come with an edge. For Shultz, style has less to do with what's trending and more to do with what a room is actually trying to say.
"A well-designed room isn't defined by what's currently trending," she says. "It's defined by balance, personality, and the confidence to tell a story through the objects you choose to live with." Bea Furnishings, in the end, isn't really in the business of making furniture look new. It's in the business of making people look twice.
The 805 is the foundation for how I create today
A well-designed room isn’t defined by what’s currently trending. It’s defined by balance, personality, and the confidence to tell a story through the objects you live with.