Pamela Anderson likes to save things. Not too many things (“I don’t hoard,” she says), or even the fanciest things. But she holds on to the meaningful stuff. “The other day I had a leak in the roof,” she says, sitting in the office of a furniture showroom in downtown Los Angeles. “And so I went up there and I looked in the loft, and I had all these crates of baby clothes. And so I took all the baby clothes out, washed them, and put all the little outfits together. And I’ve been just sending the kids pictures of their baby clothes. They’re like, Mom.”

“Unfortunately,” she says, laughing, “I am very sentimental.”

I am interviewing the luminous Anderson in honor of that sentimentality: she has just launched a line of furniture and homewares with the antique-inspired LA studio Olive Ateliers, appropriately titled The Sentimentalist. The name is of a piece with much of her output: her bestselling 2023 memoir was called Love, Pamela; the Netflix documentary about her life from the same year is Pamela, A Love Story. “I’m a romantic,” she says.

“But this is the most romantic time of my life, funny enough,” she continues. “It’s just really having a relationship with yourself and making yourself happy. And that’s the key to it all. I should have learned that earlier!”

Anderson is romantic (consider her Substack, where she recently opined on “the art of feeling everything”) and so is her furniture, a series of 40 pieces primarily made of wicker, which she collects. The pieces all beg to be laden with piles of fresh-cut flowers and hanging wet bathing suits, the sorts of comfy indoor-outdoor seating that you could flop onto after a day in the garden. The collection even includes dog beds, in honor of her pets Lucky, Lola, and Zou Bisou Bisou (in the past, dissatisfied with the aesthetics of dog beds on the market, she got James Perse to make them for her, custom). It’s all inspired by years spent in Malibu (where Vivienne Westwood used to stay over on a blow-up mattress), the South of France (“It’s so bohemian,” she says), and her tiny hometown of Ladysmith, BC, on Vancouver Island, where she currently lives on a property she purchased from her late grandmother nearly 30 years ago.

“I’ve always been a decorator,” says Anderson. “And my kids grew up on white denim and lots of flowers and lots of wicker while they were skateboarding, surfing—being wild boys raised by wolves, basically.”

At The Sentimentalist launch event, a live jazz band played as guests were handed white fans, and the Olive Ateliers showroom had been decorated with swaths of lace, flowers, and doilies—plus, for an added touch of earthiness, an actual dirt floor. Founders Kendall Knox, Ben Knox, and Laura Sotelo said they became “enamored” with Anderson after she visited their showroom in 2023. “We had a shared sensibility of taste,” Kendall recounts, as her toddler, Rhodes, happily chewed on some wicker. “And we shared the way we like to style, and the things we love to keep and why we keep them, with a love of memory and whatnot.”

They called Anderson’s team to see if she was interested. She was. “And so we just sat down, and we really thought about her rituals, how she lives, the kinds of objects she has kept in her home,” says Kendall. “A lot of what her grandma owned, she still has. It’s rattan that has worn and has softened, and it’s a teak picnic table that has weathered over time. And we were like, perfect. There was no weird gimmick. It just made sense for both of us.”

Anderson’s bucolic home base on Vancouver Island, where her grandmother’s furniture lies overlooking the Salish Sea, is always changing, updated with new plants, trees, and renovations: “It never ends!” It’s the home of her famed garden, the subject of the HGTV series, Pamela’s Garden of Eden, where she’s recently planted potatoes, radishes, beets, and asparagus for the changing season. “My home has always been very important to me, where I could create a safe space for my kids and dogs and family,” she says. “And I’ve always had a beach lifestyle, so I don’t like things to be too precious. I want to really live in things and live on them, to get out of the ocean and jump on the couch and put your feet up.”

Anderson noted she was eager to get back and plant, having been away from the island for five months while shooting two films back to back. After her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, auteurs have lined up to cast her. As part of her preparation process, she writes long streams of consciousness for her characters on yellow legal pads, and has often discussed how, in her early Hollywood days—while modeling and filming her star-making role as C.J. Parker on Baywatch—she learned how to overcome innate shyness by creating new personas to inhabit. It was good practice.

“I look back, and in hindsight, I can see what I was doing in the moment,” says Anderson. “I always had a great imagination. And I feel like that was almost like a protective thing, too. So it's funny that I’m doing this for a living and it's my career, because I’ve been doing it since I was little.”

Over the last few years, the actress has had a renaissance, her career blooming once again in her 50s. It’s satisfying to watch someone succeed by becoming more and more themselves—and discovering new avenues for her creativity along the way. “If you turn some of the crazy things that have happened in your life into fertilizer, you can plant a new garden or paint a new picture,” she says. “Paint your life the way you want it to be.”