We are Caleb and Ali Smothers, a family making room for a richer, more human life—at home, around a table and wherever good work needs somewhere to land.
Caleb + Ali · Henry + VioletA family learning to make room.
Who we are
Our work begins at home.
Caleb grew up in Central Texas and carries a lifelong love of story, land, old things and the people who gather around them. Ali is from the DFW world and has a gift for creating the feeling of an evening before anyone has thought to name it. She brings an eye for beauty, a planner’s heart and the instinct to make people feel considered.
Together, we live in Fort Worth with our children, Henry and Violet. We are not presenting a perfect life. We are paying attention to the one we have—and practicing how to make it warmer, more honest and more open to other people.
The Rooted & Known is the work growing out of that practice: gatherings, useful objects, journals, homes, music and places that help people feel rooted, seen and known.
Our guiding light
A life received. A way of love.
PerichoresisThe great dance · union and participation
We begin with gratitude—for God, Source, Creator, the Divine, whatever name helps us speak honestly about the mystery and goodness at the center of life. We believe life is gift before it is achievement, and that gratitude is meant to become a way of moving through the world.
For us, Jesus is the blueprint: the way of welcome, truth, compassion, courage and love. Not a badge to wear or a wall to build, but a life to learn from and live into. What Christ did on planet earth shifted our story and made things new, reconnecting us to the Divine Source—a way back into union, participation and the great dance of love already underway.
The nine fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The fruits are the overflow of a life rooted in union with the Divine, becoming visible in the way we live when we remain connected to the Source of it all. Together, these nine words become practices we live into in ordinary days. We are still learning, imperfectly and with an open hand. No one has to arrive with the same language to find a place here; we hope what we believe becomes visible as welcome, care, generosity and room at the table.
ROOTED & KNOWN is not one product or one kind of gathering. It is a connected world built around the same invitation: come closer to what matters, practice it in ordinary life and pass something good forward.
01 · Gather
Make room at the table.
Nights at the Table, music, conversation and small experiences that help people arrive as they are.
The road between these doors is Places Worth Knowing—the hotels, landscapes, hosts and corners of the world that keep teaching us how to pay attention.
The dream
What if the welcome had an address?
Someday, we hope to grow toward a house and farm with good beds, long tables, a garden, a few cabins and open doors. A place shaped by family life, thoughtful work and the belief that people need somewhere to arrive, rest and be known.
For now, we are building it in smaller forms: a page, a shirt, a song, a room, a meal, a conversation, an evening beneath the stars. Each one is a way of testing the dream in real life and asking whether beauty can become care.
We are not trying to look like the answer. We are trying to become the kind of people who can keep the door open.
The beginning of our shared tableRobert Carr Chapel + The Fort Worth Club
The people who made us
The welcome began before us.
We carry pieces of our families into everything we make. Bubble, aka Chief, taught Caleb to ask questions, tell stories and do his part and a little bit more. Birdie brings creativity and warmth in the form of a song, a craft, an essential oil or a good story she has heard. HJ and Honey gave Ali her eye for good taste, her love of throwing an epic party and her instinct to make people feel seen and taken care of. Honey never goes anywhere without bringing a sweet surprise along with her.
Nannie and Vaughn are legends in our family. Although they have been gone a while, their memory lives on in the ranch, the stories and the table that kept making room. At the heart of our family has always been the instinct to gather and retreat—to get away together, tell the stories again and let everyone have a part. We hope to carry that forward on a bigger scale through ROOTED & KNOWN: more rooms, more tables, more shared time and more people invited into the good of it. Our brothers and sisters—Ryan, Josh, Nathan, Ben and Jennifer—made becoming ourselves a shared project. We honor them by keeping the table generous, the stories alive and the person in front of us worth noticing.
This is the life we are trying to live: rooted in what we have received, known by the people we love and open to the people still finding their way to the table.
