Planters

Overview

Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2025

Wearstler had been dreaming of outdoor vessels for years before the idea found its shape: they play too vital a role in her interior projects to keep leaving to someone else. What clicked things into place was a set of glaze samples Serax sent over, finishes with a soul and dimension she knew she wanted to build a whole collection around. The result is four design languages — Book, Dune, Mesa, Rift — each named for something the natural world does slowly: Rift after the parallel striations of rock faces, Dune after windswept sand in motion, Book after layered sediment stacking in clean lines, Mesa after staggered ridgelines. The material is terracotta and stoneware, shaped, fired, then finished entirely by hand. The palette stays earthy and raw: mossy greens, sunbaked browns, inky black-greens, weathered whites, but the real subject is the glaze itself - pooling and shifting across the surface as the light moves, so no two hours make a piece look quite the same.

Kelly Wearstler x Serax Planters — image 2

Kelly Wearstler x Serax Planters — image 3

Creative Process

Every piece started with expert technique and ended with room for the artisan's hand to leave its mark. The glaze application in particular was never meant to be perfectly repeatable. Wearstler and Serax's artisans worked the balance between sculptural, architectural forms and softer, fluid ones, moving across scale from tall, poised vessels to wide, grounding ones, so the four languages read as a family without repeating a single gesture.

Kelly Wearstler x Serax Planters — image 4

Kelly Wearstler x Serax Planters — image 6

Kelly Wearstler x Serax Planters — image 5

Creative Direction

For the campaign, Wearstler placed the four families in the inner courtyard of her own Beverly Hills house – no lineup by product code, no imposed logic. She let the vessels find their own hierarchy. The effect reads less like a display and more like an actual gathering; height doing the talking, the tall pieces rising into the exchange while the low ones anchor it, the whole courtyard behaving like a room caught mid-conversation rather than a photograph of one.

What I love most is how alive these glazes feel. They move across the surfaces in the most fluid way, creating layers of color that shift depending on the light.

Kelly Wearstler