The Tamesis
Pamela Anderson likes to save things. Not too many things (“I don’t hoard,” she says), not even the most exotic items. But she insists on things that make sense. “One day, my roof leaked,” she said, sitting in her office at a furniture showroom in downtown Los Angeles. “So I went over there and I looked in the attic and I had all these boxes of baby clothes. So I took out all the baby clothes and washed them and put all the little clothes together. I just sent the kids pictures of their baby clothes. And they were like, Mother“.
“Unfortunately,” she laughs, “I’m very emotional.”
My interview with Luminous Anderson was in honor of this sentimentality: She’s just launched a collection of furniture and homewares in collaboration with antique-style Los Angeles studio Olive Ateliers, aptly titled The Sentimentalists. The name is part of much of her work: her best-selling 2023 memoir is called Love, Pamela;The same year a Netflix documentary about her life was Pamela, a love story. “I’m a romantic person,” she said.
“But it was the most romantic moment of my life and it was fun,” she continued. “It’s just about really having a relationship with yourself and being happy with yourself. That’s the key to everything. I should have known this sooner!”
Photo: Courtesy of Olive Ateliers
Photo: Courtesy of Olive Ateliers
Anderson yes Romantic (think of her Substack, where she recently opined on “the art of feeling everything”), so are her furniture, a collection of 40 pieces made mostly from wicker. Filled with piles of fresh cut flowers and hanging wetsuits, the pieces make for comfortable indoor-outdoor seating that you can lie on after a day in the garden. The collection even includes dog beds in honor of her pets Lucky, Lola and Zou Bisou Bisou (in the past, she was dissatisfied with the aesthetics of the dog beds on the market, so she had them custom-made for her by James Perse). It’s all inspired by the years she spent in Malibu (Vivienne Westwood once slept on an air mattress), the South of France (“It was so bohemian,” she says) and her small hometown of Ladysmith, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, where she currently lives in a property she purchased from her late grandmother nearly 30 years ago.
“I’ve always been a decorator,” Anderson said. “My kids grew up on white denim, lots of flowers, lots of wicker, but they also skateboarded, surfed — basically feral kids raised by wolves.”
