Pamela Anderson calls me from Arcady, her seven-acre Vancouver Island estate, while making hot cross buns for Easter. “They’re my dad’s favorite. I’ve already made a whole bunch of them. I’ll make more tomorrow and bake them the next day,” she says in a sweet, singsongy voice. Anderson, by her own admission, is a big baker: She’s always whipping up muffins or sourdough because “I always feel that, if I make my bread, I can eat as much as I want.” Actually, she’s a big…lot of things: gardener, pickler, dog food maker (“they eat sweet potatoes and celery and different oils,” she says of the homemade meals she makes her “babies”), and furniture maker.
The last descriptor is a recent addition. On April 8, she launched her first line of homeware with Olive Ateliers, the cool-girl Los Angeles brand known for its Southern-California-meets-Provence aesthetic. It counts Kendall Jenner, Selena Gomez, Sofia Richie, and Margot Robbie as customers—and, well, Anderson. Owners Kendall and Ben Knox met The Last Showgirl star while she was perusing their vast Downtown Los Angeles warehouse for antique urns. A friendship—and then business partnership—bloomed.
Not only was Anderson incredibly nice, but she also had a natural eye: “We had such a shared sensibility in style and in taste and how a home comes together,” Kendall Knox tells Vanity Fair. “I didn’t know a ton about her other than what she’d done in the past with her modeling and Hollywood career. I was really taken aback about how sweet and very rooted in feeling she was.” So the Knoxes asked Anderson if she’d help them design a new indoor-outdoor collection. She agreed.
Nearly every piece in Anderson and Olive Atelier’s collection is made from wicker. Anderson is obsessed with wicker: “It just goes everywhere,” she says, before rattling off her own wicker pieces: There’s a rocking chair she sits in to relax after coming back from weeks on set; the outdoor furniture her boys throw their wetsuits on after going surfing at their house in Malibu; and all the wicker that once belonged to her grandmother, which Anderson is currently restoring and putting in her new farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut. (She’s also in the process of restoring that home— “a beautiful Rochester house,” Anderson says.) So she created her own pieces, from chairs to stools to coffee tables to bar carts, to baskets for flowers and even a spud carrier for potatoes. (It’s not a cutesy novelty item, by the way. Anderson often finds herself carrying potatoes and would like a vessel for them.) Knox points out one item—called the Reader Rattan armchair—that Anderson in particular fixated on making cozy and huggable.
Anderson admits that her sons, Brandon and Dylan, had to conceptually rein her in. She was bursting with ideas—what if she did birdhouses? Or dog beds? “My kids said, ‘Mom, just keep it small; keep it intimate; keep it about your lounges and dining tables and chairs, more of family gatherings and stools and baskets,’” she tells Vanity Fair. “I really use harvesting baskets. This morning I was out picking up all the daffodils that got blown over in this little bit of a windstorm and rain last night. And I just had this whole basket full of broken daffodils,” she says.
“I really use harvesting baskets,” Anderson tells Vanity Fair with all the sincerity.
Courtesy of Olive Ateliers
Anderson has lived a high-profile life, rising to fame as C.J. Parker on Baywatch and posing for Playboy magazine various times. Yet all the while, she’s been a hidden homebody. She cultivated a vast garden on the grounds of Arcady where she grew roses, cherries, melons, and more. She built a massive custom kitchen at her house in Malibu. She adapted a vintage, homey aesthetic, driving old Ford Broncos and making overnight oats. Then there’s her Instagram, filled with pictures of her in overalls and sun hats and holding gardening sheers as well as the grand-millennial interiors of her homes. However, Anderson considered it all a private hobby.*
In the past five years, that’s all changed. In 2022, HGTV filmed a docuseries, Pamela’s Garden of Eden, about her renovation of Arcady. Two years later, she published a plant-based cookbook, I Love You: Recipes From the Heart. Come 2025, a show where Anderson invited top chefs to cook with her at home, Pamela’s Cooking With Love, premiered. Then she partnered with Flamingo Estate to produce limited edition pickles, made from a recipe that was passed down to her from her great-aunt Vie. “To be honest, six months ago we didn’t know a ton about pickles other than we liked them,” the Southern California brand wrote of the drop. “But in this house, when Pamela Anderson calls with an idea, the answer is always a resounding yes.” Why pickles? “Anytime you get a jar of pickles in the mail, I think you’re going to put a smile on your face. So I thought, Pamela’s pickles are funny, and it’s just to make people smile,” Anderson says. “I send out pickles anytime I am making a flavor to lucky addresses. I say, ‘If you’re on the pickle list, I love you.” Her Flamingo Estate pickles quickly sold out.
It all begs the question: Is Pamela Anderson fast on her way to being a lifestyle guru, à la Gwyneth Paltrow or Martha Stewart? Knox says that it was her natural taste that drew them to Anderson: “We’ve been approached by a lot of different celebrities who shop with us,” she says. “But Pamela and I were drawn to very similar things and objects.”
For now, Anderson is content balancing her dual interests: “I do films, but I have this design side of me—garden life, my little fairy life.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story included a quote from Pamela Anderson on her career. It has been removed for clarity.
