Pamela Anderson likes to save things. Not too many things (“I don’t hoard,” she says), or even the fanciest things. But she holds on to the meaningful stuff. “The other day I had a leak in the roof,” she says, sitting in the office of a furniture showroom in downtown Los Angeles. “And so I went up there and I looked in the loft, and I had all these crates of baby clothes. And so I took all the baby clothes out, washed them, and put all the little outfits together. And I’ve been just sending the kids pictures of their baby clothes. They’re like, Mom.”
“Unfortunately,” she says, laughing, “I am very sentimental.”
I am interviewing the luminous Anderson in honor of that sentimentality: she has just launched a line of furniture and homewares with the antique-inspired LA studio Olive Ateliers, appropriately titled The Sentimentalist. The name is of a piece with much of her output: her bestselling 2023 memoir was called Love, Pamela; the Netflix documentary about her life from the same year is Pamela, A Love Story. “I’m a romantic,” she says.
“But this is the most romantic time of my life, funny enough,” she continues. “It’s just really having a relationship with yourself and making yourself happy. And that’s the key to it all. I should have learned that earlier!”
Photo: Courtesy of Olive Ateliers
Photo: Courtesy of Olive Ateliers
Anderson is romantic (consider her Substack, where she recently opined on “the art of feeling everything”) and so is her furniture, a series of 40 pieces primarily made of wicker, which she collects. The pieces all beg to be laden with piles of fresh-cut flowers and hanging wet bathing suits, the sorts of comfy indoor-outdoor seating that you could flop onto 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, dissatisfied with the aesthetics of dog beds on the market, she got James Perse to make them for her, custom). It’s all inspired by years spent in Malibu (where Vivienne Westwood used to stay over on a blow-up mattress), the South of France (“It’s so bohemian,” she says), and her tiny hometown of Ladysmith, BC, on Vancouver Island, where she currently lives on a property she purchased from her late grandmother nearly 30 years ago.
“I’ve always been a decorator,” says Anderson. “And my kids grew up on white denim and lots of flowers and lots of wicker while they were skateboarding, surfing—being wild boys raised by wolves, basically.”
