San Marino is a peaceful, affluent corner of Los Angeles, a long way from the urban sprawl of the county. The grass is green and immaculately maintained. It feels like the sky is regulated to stay at just the right shade of blue. There are yoga studios and dogs with expensive haircuts, old family markets and lots of places to get a green juice. And it’s where Davide Baroncini calls home.

A charismatic Sicilian ensconced in California, Baroncini is the ultra-stylish figure behind Ghiaia Cashmere. The label, which he started at his kitchen table in 2018, adheres to a simple – but no less difficult to achieve – premise: classic clothes made from beautiful fabrics.

It’s where you can find a pair of pleated navy chinos that feel like they’ve been in your wardrobe for years. A chambray shirt with just the right amount of fade. Chunky cashmere cardigans. And, on the day of our visit, a bespoke overcoat, designed for a private client, made from shimmering black vicuña, the wool of a cousin of the llama that lives high in the Andes and produces arguably the softest natural fibres in the world. “It’ll make you look like a panther,” Baroncini says gleefully.

“I grew up, as an Italian, surrounded by beauty,” he adds, flanked by his friendly bulldog, Ciro. The name of the brand derives from a type of stone found on Sicily’s beaches. “My wife says that I couldn’t have chosen a more difficult word to pronounce, but I kind of grew up with Ghiaia under my feet, so it works for me.

“You can go to a factory in the Italian countryside, the middle of nowhere, and there’ll be a lady there who knows exactly how to treat a garment. I stay away from using terminology or labels that people use and abuse a bit. But ‘made in Italy’ – that makes me proud.”

Inside the San Marino store, Ghiaia is a shrine to good taste and living well. There’s a chrome La Marzocco coffee machine, used to serve up jet-fuel strength double espressos, rows of antique cabinets teeming with trinkets and bits of memorabilia. Old issues of magazines, family photos and vintage oil paintings. The day’s papers hang from wooden clips on white-painted walls and, outside, there’s a small garden where Baroncini regularly hosts, cooking homemade pasta on an open flame.

“At the beginning, we were only making knitwear for the first two or three years,” he says. “I know what you must be thinking, ‘knitwear in southern California is not the smartest move’, but we kind of made it work. I promised my boss [he previously worked for Brunello Cucinelli] that I wouldn’t work for another company, so I started Ghiaia. It makes me happy to have created my own vision and to share it with people who seem to enjoy it and understand what we’re trying to achieve.”

Baroncini smokes Italian cigars and drives a vintage Alfa Romeo. The clothes are great, but the lifestyle is equally arresting. The California dream, by way of Catania. People drop by throughout the morning to say hello and sit in the garden, browse the rails, leaf through the paper, try on a few things and hang out. This area isn’t especially renowned for high-end menswear, which is exactly why he likes it.

“What I find special about San Marino, and all of Southern California, really, is the time and space,” Baroncini says. “It looks like a movie set. In the morning, the sun breaks through the trees. It’s calm, it’s polite, it beautiful.

“It’s my pace.”