Postcards From the Ranch: How Hunting Season’s Danielle Corona Created Her Rural Florida Retreat

Danielle Corona is the founder and creative director of Hunting Season, a luxury leather goods line founded in 2006. Corona moved from New York City to Bogotá in 2013 where she now produces her collection, partnering with local Colombian artisans and craftspeople. A Florida native with Cuban heritage, Corona grew up between Miami and the Lake Okeechobee countryside, where her family has owned a working ranch for 40 years. After spending extended periods at the ranch throughout the pandemic, Corona, her husband, and three children decided to make the move permanent.

Recently, Vogue caught up with Corona at her new residence, where days are spent tending to the vegetable garden, enjoying a cup of coffee on the porch, and soaking in this sprawling slice of conservation land in central Florida. Ahead, the former CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist shares firsthand why she’s returned to her Florida roots, the backstory behind her most treasured interior pieces, and the influence this pastoral setting may impart on her future collections.

After living away from my parents for almost 20 years I had a moment of reflection. It’s always been a dream to live out here, and I wanted to give my children the opportunity to experience what I experienced growing up. To feel that kind of love and responsibility for the land, to wake up and ride out at dawn with their grandfather and spend the day outside. I joke that it was part of my midlife crisis and coming to terms with the impermanence of things. I was turning 40 and thought, you know, life is happening. My parents are aging. I’m aging. My children are growing. Coming out here and being in nature and paying attention to the cycles of nature, it was like therapy for accepting my impermanence. We moved here thinking we’d only be in Florida for six months, and this is now our third year.

Photo: Anastasiia Duvallie

Florida is all flatland. We’re not on the coast here, it’s inland and it’s these wide open landscapes. When I look out the windows now, it’s all agricultural and wild land. There is something so soothing about only seeing space. Everything is slow. We have a serpentine creek that comes off the Kissimmee River that we live off of, and we’re under this live oak hammock that’s covered in Spanish moss. These huge stately trees are centuries old and you feel their presence. They have a sort of eerie, poetic feeling about them with the moss draping off.

It’s funny, a lot of people don’t realize there’s such a big ranching culture in Florida. I sometimes forget how much of the state is made up of it. Florida is the first place that cattle ranching started in the country, because the Spanish brought the cattle through Florida when they arrived. The nice thing about this area is it’s part of the Florida Wildlife Corridor and so the land is all conservation; it’s kind of like this protected green belt that stretches through the state. In contrast to Miami, which is a city in constant motion and always reinventing itself, you drive less than three hours north and you enter a whole other world. Dirt roads, open pastures, traditions that have held on for generations.

The house was originally this old small Florida ‘cracker’ house that was in the parking lot of Eli’s Western Wear (one of the few shops in the closest town, which is 30 minutes away). My dad bought the land so long ago and that’s what they could afford at the time. They brought the house over on a trailer and it was a wooden two-bedroom house with a porch. From there, they built extensions and now it’s formed into this long, beautiful one-story home with porches and a very traditional kind of Southern architecture with wooden beams and metal roofs.

Max Strang is a local architect who was brought on a few years ago to do an extension. He happens to be from this part of Florida and he cherishes this land. His extension incorporated that traditional architecture but with a bit more modern lines, higher ceilings, and a second floor on one part so that we could have a lookout over the ranch. I’ve always been drawn to his use of natural materials. He works with organic textures like stone and wood, but in a way where he brings it into a modern context. It’s similar to what I do with Hunting Season, creating that bridge between organic materials and a refined design.

Photo: Anastasiia Duvallie

We’ve kept our home in Bogotá because it was the home that my children were born in. It’s a two-and-a-half hour flight to the northern coast, where we go often. For us, it’s very important to keep Colombia in our lives for my work, but also just for our family life. I come from a Cuban family, but I was born here. My family, they were ranchers in Cuba and they came over and eventually started that life here. And then my husband’s Colombian. So I always say for the kids, I want them to feel American, but I want them to know their Cuban roots and I want them to feel Colombian.

The ranch home was never a personal project, but more of a living, evolving space. It’s been in our family for decades and is a working ranch so everything relates back to the outdoors and surrounding landscapes. Nothing is too precious, it feels very lived in. Some of the pieces we’ve had for decades. I’m in the living room now and we have a stand with my grandfather’s saddle that he used to ride in the middle of the room, kind of like a sculptural piece. There’s a lot of wood, so it’s very warm and grounding. The circular cowboy print is by Charles LaSalle from the early 1900s. He was known for these Western paintings and that’s one of my dad’s pieces that he loved from so long ago.

That’s the nice thing about family homes, everybody brings a part of them to it. There’s also a collection of my dad’s old Louis L’Amour Western novels that he read when he was younger. And some of the doors are made from wood from the cow pens that had been there for 50 years or something. So you have these pieces and these materials that have come from different parts of the ranch or different moments in our lives or previous generations.

Photo: Anastasiia Duvallie

We spend a lot of time on the porch. You’re definitely there at sunrise with your coffee and you re definitely there at sunset with wine; you watch a lot of sunrises and a lot of sunsets here. The second-floor area that Max built is like the lookout and there’s a desk in front of the window. I’ve sort of taken over, it’s where I spend hours working. We’ve also been spending time in the garden growing a lot of our food. My husband s the one who manages it, but we all go out there and participate. Everything we eat goes back into the compost, goes back into the soil, and then comes back to life. And seeing that process, being a part of that process, knowing what goes into your food and what you re eating, that feels like the ultimate luxury. It took coming out here to pay attention to these details and for time to kind of stand still.

Part of the fun of moving back to the US and into this kind of culture is the sense of place. It’s the saddles, the smell of old leather, and a house barn. So much of that now I’m paying attention to, because I always have in terms of crafts and weaving. Even some of the walls around here are decorated with old horse bits or stirrups. And so now these things are all over my mood boards.

Photo: Anastasiia Duvallie

I actually have sent some of my bags to a local leather weaver who does lacing and braiding. She does it mainly for rodeo prizes but I gave her a couple of my bags and I asked her to braid the edges just to bring in that old traditional craft of leather lacing, which you see a lot in saddles and that kind of thing. I would love to find a collaboration here to do something like that, to bring that American craft into our collection. My dream collaboration is with Lucchese, the American boot company. It’s always been an American brand that values and is known for its craftsmanship. I’m always saying it’s like the Hermès of the United States.

Ultimately, from our time on the ranch, I want to instill in my kids both an appreciation for the land and a sense of responsibility toward it. I think this means that you’ve paid attention to the cycles in nature, the shifting of the seasons, new life. Life moves fast. And I feel like this is a place where we can plant a seed to appreciate that kind of slowing down, paying attention, and protecting the land. That’s definitely a legacy that I’d like to continue.