The Maker

House of Sabine started because I made soap.

That’s really it.

I’m a therapist by profession, and after years of work that happens almost entirely in my head, I wanted to make something with my hands. My mother was a self-taught oil painter and my daughter is an artist. I assumed it had skipped a generation until I tried cold-process soap.

Obsessed is the accurate word. The chemistry, the colors, the fragrances, the fact that no two batches ever turn out exactly alike. We no longer eat at the dining table, because it’s covered in trays of bars and scrubs, and my husband, a patient man, hauls two seventy-pound suitcases through airports because I buy my supplies in the United States and carry them to Italy and Brazil.

The name House of Sabine came later. I divide my life between Italy and Brazil, with Texas still very much part of who I am, and somehow the name connects all three pieces of my life.

The Sabine women belong to the history of ancient Rome. Sabina is the region just east of us in Italy. The Sabine River runs along the Texas–Louisiana border. And Juniperus sabina, savin juniper, is an old medicinal plant with a complicated history of its own.

So the name stuck.

I make everything in small batches, usually because I have an idea I want to see in real life. Sometimes that means a bar inspired by the sea in Brazil, an old Italian building, river stones, autumn fruit, botanicals, or something I saw out a window. Sometimes I just want to see what happens if I put five colors together and pour them in a particular way.

Some experiments are beautiful. Some are absolutely terrible and go straight in the trash.

I’m not particularly interested in making soap that looks like everyone else’s, and I’m definitely not going to tell you that a bar of soap will transform your skin, cure anything, or change your life. It’s soap. Its job is to get you clean.

I just think it can be beautiful while it does it.

Welcome to House of Sabine.