The Short List
Limited-production pieces that simply make a room...Work like this is spoken for by interior designers long before it reaches a shop. We get a handful of pieces at a time, and they come straight to you.
You're on. We'll write a few days before.
What this actually is
There's a kind of shopping that doesn't happen in stores. The interior designers whose work turns up in Veranda or Architectural Digest don't call showrooms for the pieces that make a room — they call the makers directly. You may know the name from the page. Reaching them yourself is another matter.
The Short List is that call, placed on your behalf. Even we can only secure a handful of pieces at a time from makers like these — what lands on this list is what we could get.
Two releases a month through the holidays, then one a month. This is how we intend to work from here on.
Releases Coming Soon...
Here are the first three. We'll be announcing more before the year's out.
Ben Owen III
Ben Owen III was at the wheel by eight and formally apprenticed to his father and grandfather by thirteen, in Seagrove, North Carolina. He is the third Ben Owen to make that walk. He still finishes many pieces the slow way — a four-chambered wood kiln, four days of tending the fire, letting the ash fall where it will and calling that the glaze.
Named a North Carolina Living Treasure, a recognition for reaching the highest level of achievement in his field. His vses are in the Smithsonian and the Mint Museum —
and have been commissioned for the Ritz-Carlton in Tokyo, for Herons at the Umstead, and as the centerpiece at Pinehurst during the US Open.
A four-day long firing only yields what it yields. We were lucky to secure a few.
Corey Alston
Corey Alston's baskets are in the Smithsonian, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the International African American Museum. In 2024 he was named a United States Artists Fellow, and this July one of his pieces took the Guinness world record for the largest sweetgrass basket ever made — a single commission that took him a year at the bench. Most of his year now goes to museums. Very little of his work reaches a shop at all.
The baskets I get asked to repair are the ones that sat on a shelf. They go brittle. These were made to be carried and filled and emptied — they have always been working baskets. One that gets used will outlast one that gets admired.
A basket like this takes a week to weave, start to finish.
Sandy Whitaker
Sandy Whitaker has been pressing botanicals for more than twenty years— most of them grown in her own garden, the rest gathered from roadsides and woods around her home in Cartersville, Georgia. She keeps the pressings in map drawers and arranges them by eye, hand-lettering the botanical name in the corner of each finished piece. Pressed white flowers on a black background: the plants themselves, not reproductions of them.
Interior designer James Farmer has used her pressings in two of his books. Flower magazine ran her last year among the artists keeping the herbarium tradition alive
A pressing is one of one. Each piece is unique.
Get on The Short List
We don't run ads for these, and we won't fill up your inbox either — just a note when something new is finishing, or the story behind it, sent to the people who'd actually want to know before anyone else does.
You're on. We'll write a few days before.
A note or two a month — sometimes a release, sometimes the story behind one. Never a sales pitch. We don't share your address with anyone, and you can leave whenever you like.
That's really the whole idea.
A short list of makers, an even shorter list of pieces, and an even shorter list of people who see it before it's gone. Leave your email above and be one of them.