I used to be a musician. Properly.
On stages across Australia, with an album, White Heat, that hit number two on the ARIA charts.
I know what it feels like to make something from nothing and have a room full of strangers feel it back. To write something true and watch it land. Making something that holds was the whole point of being alive for a long time.
Then I got a real job. And I stopped.
It wasn't a decision, exactly. It was a slow trade-off, the kind most women make somewhere in their late twenties without anyone naming it out loud: you box your creativity into something sensible, something responsible, something that pays the mortgage and makes sense at dinner parties.
You tell yourself it was the right call. For a long time, I believed that.
What I didn't expect was how much I'd miss it. Not the music specifically.
The making.
---
What goes missing when you stop making things
There's a particular feeling that comes from creating something with your hands. Choosing something carefully. Placing it with intention. Watching something raw become something that works, something that holds, something that quietly earns its place in a space.
I had that feeling when I made music. And when it was gone, I looked for it everywhere else.
I looked for it in my home. And I kept finding things that didn't work.
Tea towels that smeared. Surfaces that felt permanently cluttered. Objects that were decorative and useless and somehow everywhere. A house that looked fine in photos and felt chaotic to actually live in.
I didn't want a styled home. I wanted one that functioned. That felt considered. That made the daily rhythm of life (the bench wipe, the morning coffee, the end-of-day reset) feel a little more human.
---
The object that started everything
I started with a tea towel.
That sounds underwhelming. It wasn't.
A tea towel is the most-reached-for object in most kitchens. It touches everything. It sits in view all day. And the vast majority of them are terrible. Thin cotton that smears rather than absorbs, goes limp on the rail, and ends up in a ball on the bench within a week.
I sourced 100% stone-washed Belgian linen. I had it made properly. I named it the Lisiére, the French word for the edge of a forest, for the threshold between the wild and the domestic. That felt right.
It dries things. Properly. It gets softer every wash. It holds its shape on the rail. It's a small thing. It's the thing you reach for every single day.
And making it, choosing the weight, the stone-wash, the colourways, the name, felt like making something again.
---
Art is art in any form
A song. A painting. A kitchen that quietly resets at the end of the day.
The act of making something, choosing it carefully, placing it with intention, living alongside it, is a creative act. It always has been. We've just been taught to reserve the word "art" for things on walls and stages.
I think the objects in your home are a creative decision. The ones that work and the ones that don't, the ones that earn their place and the ones that pile up in corners: all of it reflects something about what you value and what you've settled for.
Saltbush Living started as me refusing to settle. For things that didn't work, for a creativity I'd traded away without realising, for a home that looked fine and felt hard to live in.
---
Who this brand is actually for
Saltbush is for the woman who feels that too.
Who wants her home to work harder without a renovation. Who is tired of buying things that look good once and collapse. Who knows that calm is not a luxury. It's a decision, made object by object, day by day.
I built this brand because I needed it first. Because I was a musician who stopped making things and found her way back through linen and iron and stone, through the quiet art of a home that actually works.
If that sounds like you, you're in the right place.