The basket is the summer house's most reliable resident — up before everyone, useful all day, still looking good at dinner. It predates pottery, has survived decades of trends, and can be spotted in every chic decorating book from the 90s. Each design has its place from the market and the table to the staircase and the garden.
Martha Stewart understood this early. The beamed kitchen ceiling of her 1810 Connecticut farmhouse was lined with them — a detail that made it into her first book, Entertaining, in 1982. She has since built an entire house on her Bedford farm dedicated to storing her collection.
Erin Pollard could relate to this. The designer behind Underwater Weaving, based between New York and Maine, came to basketry the way most lasting things arrive: not as a plan, but as a sort of serendipity. She was teaching herself to make baskets when the world, as she puts it, "opened up quite immediately." Work calls went missed because she was busy twisting vines in the garden. She felt, for the first time, the hand-brain connection she had never known was missing — and once she felt it, a new path was inevitable.
What followed was a studio built on the Shaker premise that beauty is inherent in the things we use for our daily lives. Pollard works with a small team weaving rattan — a material that first arrived in America through the whaling industry, the same stuff Nantucket Lightship Baskets are made from — sourced from farmers in Southeast Asia, soaked, woven, and in some cases finished with natural dyes. The lineage is long, and she knows it, though she wears it lightly.
Her own home is a working proof of the philosophy. She and her husband, both makers, live with what they produce and appreciate the same handmade quality in everything around them — simple designs with a story or a point of view. The baskets settle into the house and age with use, which is exactly what they are meant to do. She carries one to the grocery store, snips smoke bush from a friend's garden and tucks it into a stair tote. It's just how we live now, she says.
The Folk Fleur collaboration with PORTA followed from shared taste and, crucially, a shared brief: Pollard and her mother — her design partner, her co-conspirator — wanted to bring PORTA's colour and playfulness to the shapes they return to every summer. A breakfast tray for honey toast and coffee. A cloche for the gentle chaos of outdoor tables. A pair of Love Baskets for things shared. A hand basket for an impressive weight of hydrangeas. A stair tote for everything else, which turns out to be quite a lot.
Her great-grandmother's baskets are still in use. Her mother's from the eighties and nineties are still on display. The ones she makes today will be the same. She's fairly certain about this, and so are we.
