Brian Noyes left his career as a magazine art director to start a bakery business in Fauquier County.
he call of the green rolling farmland fifty miles west of my Washington, D.C., office was too persistent to ignore; it became a 24- hour siren in my head. I resigned my position early this year as the art director at Smithsonian magazine to follow an intense passion to launch a bakery in rural Virginia. So persistent was the call, I didn’t even have a site for the new business when I walked out of the magazine office for the last time.
I’ve designed publications for over 30 years, including House & Garden, Preservation, Architecture, with two stints as art director of The Washington Post Magazine. For a long while the career was great fun and the envy of my pals—supervising photo shoots in Paris, working with the nation’s best writers and photographers, meeting personalities (John Wayne made me a tuna sandwich in his kitchen)—but, eventually, the creative work became overshadowed by ever-growing institutional bureaucracy, politics, and personnel management. I found that I couldn’t wait to get to my small farm in Orlean, in western Fauquier, and throw some dough in the oven.
I'm a fourth-generation Californian, one of four twins in the family, and my parents worked hard to feed our family of seven. Meals were loving but not haute cuisine, occasionally elevated with the heat-and-serve dinners coming into popularity in the early 1960’s. My introduction to cooking and baking came instead from 3,000 miles away, when my Uncle Stan challenged me to crosscountry bake-offs from his home in Florida. He’d send loaves of his latest breads and I’d respond with some kind of pastry effort, usually cookies, accompanied by my invented recipe. A constructive critic, Uncle Stan would send back the recipe with suggested changes in red ink. When I moved east to the Sunshine State to work at Tampa Magazine, our baking challenges escalated in his kitchen—much to the consternation of his wife, Darla, who cleaned up after us. We invented some tasty items, however, including a honey whole grain/sunflower bread that I still make. My passion for baking was launched. I ravaged through cookbooks and magazines for new challenges.
Years after I moved to the nation’s capital to work for The Washington Post, my partner Dwight and I bought a three-acre country place for a weekend getaway. We fixed it up, planted fruit trees, and toured the area in our red 1954 Ford pickup truck, which I bought from fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger. Always looking for a creative outlet, I started making fruit jams at the farm on Saturdays, slapping a “Red Truck” label on the jars and selling them through the Village Green, our local gift and antiques store on Leeds Manor Road in Orlean. The encouragement of Sandy Gilliam, the store’s owner, and the enthusiasm of my customers led to baking, and soon I was cranking out dozens of loaves of breads, pies, and pastries on Friday nights to meet the demand. When I showed up in the old red truck early one Saturday to drop off my baked goods and found the parking lot full of customers waiting for me, I knew there was a demand for good quality homemade items. I enrolled in evening baking courses at L’Academie de Cuisine in suburban Maryland and, after two rounds of bread and pastry courses at the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA) in Hyde Park, New York, I was determined to make the bakery succeed and get me out to the country full time.
