About Us

Partners Vulfie Munson and J. Paloma Glass co-founded Olde World Artisans in 1988, a faux finishing, mural and Venetian Plaster business. Projects over the years ranged fromvhigh-end residential to commercial applications including working on television studios, apartment building, churches and well known Rancho Santa Fe restaurant, “Mille Fleur”. With a combined experience of over 60 years in the remodeling and home improvement industry, they have developed a reputation of integrity and client satisfaction.

Our mission has always been to provide the best service possible by listening to our clients needs, and to always learn and improve ourselves on a constant basis. Projects we have had over the years have ranged from commercial projects to residential homes, many times taking us to cities other than our home base in San Diego, CA.

Meet Vulfie

In 1980, Vulfie started his own professional painting contracting business and has been working in the construction and art field his entire life and has engineered numerous projects ranging from large scale sand sculptures to mutant vehicles to custom lost wax bronzes.

Vulfie continued on to become an accomplished sculptor and has exhibited his lost wax bronze sculptures in various art shows and galleries in San Diego in addition to working on commissioned pieces. In addition he works on numerous remodels in the home improvement industry and has spent considerable time working on Burning Man art cars such as “Mr. Cephalo”, “Frobot”, and
“Alpha Ceti V Eel“.  He has also been involved in four theme camps, “Amberverts” and “Khans Asylum” and got accepted as an honorarium artist from BurningMan for an art installation that was placed directly under the Man inside the maze that was called “You are Who”, an interactive participation creation that would morph you and a partners face together to create multiple images.

Most recently Vulfie was awarded a grant for a sculpture and four bas-reliefs to be place on a plinth block that was placed under the man at Burning Man. The centaur pulled by winged putti was made out of paper mache and then painted to look like they were actual bronze castings. The bas-reliefs on the plinth was also out of paper mache and depicted underground scenes depicting caves, stalactites, as well as salamanders.

The skills that Vulfie brings to any project is creativity, vision, problem solving, ingenuity and an abundance of determination.


Meet Paloma

Art. Beauty. Nature. Those are three interconnected words that have great meaning in the life and work of J. Paloma Glass, co-founder of Olde World Artisans in San Diego.

A decorative artist with a background in interior design, Paloma grew up in a canyon with oak trees and a river running through it. “I spent most of my childhood in that canyon,”

In her adult life, Paloma has been disappointed to see how urbanization has disrupted so much of the natural beauty in the world. “It seems strange to see that the city I grew up in, San Diego, has separated itself from nature so much,” she says.

As she pursues art as a livelihood, Paloma gives a great deal of thought of how all of us can live a better life as characterized by a closer relationship with nature and with one another. It is one of her goals to create what she calls “a sustainable community with individuals working together in harmony to create a place of peace, beauty, love, authenticity, creativity, cooperation, respect and joy for everyone, including the plant and animal kingdom, and our Mother Earth.”

It’s a pretty lofty goal, and Paloma admits that it will take considerable time to achieve. In the meantime, she is using her life’s work to bring beauty to the surroundings of her clients.

Parental Influences

Much of Paloma’s values about art, beauty and nature come directly from her parents. Regarding her mother, Paloma says, “She taught me to love and respect nature at a level that I will never even come close to. She taught me to work hard, show up on time, have integrity and do what you say you’re going to do.”

Paloma’s appreciation for art, meanwhile, came largely from her father. “He named me after Paloma Picasso, Picasso’s daughter, so he might have known that I would be going in that direction,” she reports.

Paloma’s father wasn’t an artist himself, though he did love to paint and enjoyed looking at the paintings of the great masters. “We had paintings by the masters plastered all over the walls,” Paloma says. “I remember having to memorize that ‘This is a Degas, and this is a Michelangelo,’ so I was exposed to the masters at a very young age.”

However, Paloma didn’t feel that she had the talent to pursue a fine arts career. “A part of me always knew that I would never be able to paint like the masters, so I was drawn toward being an interior designer. I liked the idea of walking into a space and being able to affect how it makes you feel.”

With that in mind, Paloma made a decision to attend the Design Institute of San Diego. After graduating with a degree in Art and Design in 1986, she began work as an interior designer. After a couple years, she moved from interior design into the decorative painting profession. This proved to be a more satisfying career path for her, since it combined her artistic leanings with her ability to plan a space.

“Having an interior design background has helped me a lot,” Paloma says. “I have clients who rely on me to decide colors for them and use my design knowledge, so my interior design experience has been quite essential to my business.”

A few years into her new career, Paloma had a fateful encounter at a home and garden show. She met a man named Bruce Lamb, who asked her to participate in creating a faux-finishing video. She participated in the making of the video, and this eventually led to the two of them working together to produce a nationally syndicated television show entitled “American Home Repair.” The show aired in 37 cities, reaching more than 11 million homes, for more than five years.

A Blueprint for Sustainable Living

Meanwhile, Paloma is also making progress on her ambition to create a sustainable community. She has already developed a Pinterest page, called Vuelosanto (Spanish for “Sacred Flight”), which she describes as a vision and a blueprint for how human beings can come together to create a new way of living that shows respect for all living things. She is also in the process of building a website that will provide a more detailed blueprint of this vision.

Additionally, she is immersing herself in the principles of permaculture, a creative design process based on whole-systems thinking that mimics the patterns and relationships that can be found in nature. Compatible with this, Paloma worked toward to become a certified as a feng shui consultant since the principles offeng shui are very much in keeping with her desire to create harmonious and well-balanced surroundings.

Paloma has always had the motivation to keep going—all in the interest of advancing art, beauty and nature as the guiding principles of life.

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