Little Compton's designing women

Nestled between Rhode Island's Newport-style summer cottages, in an open space with flat marshland and miles of manicured fields around it, is a food shop about the size of a teacup. Called Olga's Cup and Saucer, this doll house of a bakery in Little Compton is filled with goods that use produce picked only a few feet away.

Proprietors Olga Bravo and Becky Wagner, both artists from the Rhode Island School of Design, have been baking here since 1988, using what's available at Walker's, the farm next door. In fact, the farm is so close that in the middle of a conversation, while making a topping for pizza, Wagner turned to a visitor to excuse herself. "Oh, just a minute. I have to get some basil," she said, and took off for the fields, where she snipped fresh herbs, brought them back to the kitchen, and turned her attention once again to the pizzas.

All summer long, seven days a week, Wagner and Bravo turn out pizzas and muffins and small tarts brimming with the garden's bounty. In the fall, they close the shop on weekdays, keeping a weekend-only schedule until the day before Thanksgiving. Customers flock to Olga's for moist cookies filled with butternut squash or burritos with roasted peppers and cilantro. Not that the two cooks will guarantee having the cookies or burritos in their display case -- you never know what they'll feel like making. Even if they offer something two weeks in a row, "it may not be the same way twice," says Bravo.

During the winter, Bravo works as an illustrator -- she's currently writing and illustrating a picture cookbook for children -- and Wagner fashions brass, stainless steel, and copper into metal baskets, pie stands, and cooling racks. These racks, on which the goods are displayed at Olga's, go on sale before the shop closes for the winter.

Olga's is no secret to Little Compton locals. On a recent weekday when the shop was closed, the phone rang half a dozen times with inquiries about what the partners would offer over the weekend. Then, while Bravo and Wagner were being photographed outside the shop, 15 cars pulled up in front of the store. ''We're not open," the partners called out, waving to their regular customers. Both women are a little amazed at their popularity. "When I was a student at RISD," says Bravo, "I would never have imagined that I would be doing this now, that it was possible to combine being an artist with cooking."