About Boathouse Mercantile:
Boathouse products are my formulations made in small batches in our San Juan Island studio. I mostly compound everything myself, unless we’re slammed and I pull in a reinforcement (named Steve).
We I met as summer kids and “forgot to leave” (40yrs, three kids and a couple of careers ago). We are deeply rooted here. Steve is an ER nurse, we both volunteer at SJI EMS. We live in a 500sq ft. house. Our three grown children also live on the island.
I’ve always been a maker. It used to be handbags, now fragrance. I paint, and also make memorial jewelry and sculpture from the ashes of pets and loved ones (let’s talk). It’s all a journey towards some “far-away freedom”. Scent is killer because it expresses what cannot be “said” with words. I always want to provoke a feeling of freedom from time, anxiety, ambition – and shifting ideas about how things should be. Scent stimulates a vague memory or far-off idea (a person, smoke, grade school, lemons, dirt) – relics of experience. I create fragrances to capture it. Perfume as art roots us in a moment.