Planters

Overview

Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2025

Wearstler had been dreaming of outdoor vessels for years. They play such a vital role in her interior projects that designing her own became the natural next step. A set of glaze samples from Serax brought it into focus. The finishes had a soul and dimension 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, and the glaze is the real subject, pooling and shifting across the surface as the light moves, so a piece looks a little different hour to hour.

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, is meant to vary from piece to piece. 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, each with its own 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 arranged the four families in the inner courtyard of her own Beverly Hills house, letting the vessels find their own hierarchy. The effect is a gathering rather than a display. Height does the talking: the tall pieces rise into the exchange, the low ones anchor it, and the courtyard reads like a room mid-conversation.

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