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H E L L O
I would love to hear from you.
Please contact me at:
tel. 416 728 5741
olivia.stren@gmail.com
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Land Reform
FASHION magazine
March, 2019
I’m at Alisal Guest Ranch and Resort, a 4,047-hectare dude ranch about 30 minutes outside of Santa Barbara, Calif., and I’m riding a horse called Zippo through the Santa Ynez Valley. There is something primordial and cinematic about the landscape here: an emerald vastness that looks like it still belongs to the Spanish vaqueros, conjuring […]
The Good Life
Canadian Traveller magazine
April, 2017
Almost every year when I was growing up in Toronto, I used to visit my grandmother at her condo in Palm Beach, Florida. Sometime around the first frost – when my friends at school (the ones with ski-lift tickets adhered to their winter jackets) started talking excitedly about things like slaloming and double-black diamonds – […]
I was seeing my mom in everything
Glow magazine
September, 2013
When my mom was nine years old, she, her sister and her mother moved from their home of Casablanca to Morocco’s capital, Rabat. They left behind my mother’s father, and also Casablanca’s vast boulevards and its bleach-white art deco buildings for the clamour and colour of Rabat’s Jewish ghetto. There, they moved in with my […]
You Must Remember This
National Geographic Traveler
December, 2012
Casablanca’s romantic past inspires a trip to Morocco—but its current buzz is the real surprise By OLIVIA STREN I have landed in the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. That thought hits me as we pull up to our hotel in Casablanca. One of this Moroccan city’s newest lodgings, the Hôtel and Spa Le Doge occupies […]
A Woman’s Work
FASHION Magazine
November, 2011
OLIVIA STREN falls under the sensuous spell of Mexico’s most celebrated chef. In Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel and film Like Water for Chocolate, heroine Tita weeps into a giant bowl of cake batter, salting—and bewitching—it with tears of longing and thwarted passion. When Tita prepares a quail dish for the lover she is denied, she […]
A Sea as Blue as a Smurf
National Post
October, 2009
A spectrum of South Pacific blue does funny things to the mind.
Animal Kingdoms
National Geographic Traveler
December, 2006
Acacia trees spread across the horizon like parasols. Laura, a young giraffe, lingers in the shade with the grace of a Henry James heroine at a garden party. Her seven-foot-tall, eight month-old son, Gordon, glides through blond grasses, while weaver birds career through jacarandas like winged lemons. At six p.m. sharp, Cosmos Mutinda, a staffer at […]
