Even as Presley Oldham was lugging a 40-pound bag of moss onto the set of a photoshoot for his debut home collection, he was still thrilled to begin revealing the latest iteration of what he’s doing. Oldham, who’s becoming increasingly renowned for his jewelry, which mixes craft, whimsy and a celebration of both personal and sustainable materials—glass, gemstones, pearls, fabric flowers his grandma made—is launching a candle housed in a blown glass jar swirled with color (he recommends using it as a cup once the candle is done), three circular glass nesting trays, and a silver weight based on a worry stone.
Like his bijoux, these home pieces—available exclusively in person with ABC Home—feel special and intimate, crafted with an eye to everything being locally made. Oldham and his partner are living in the bucolic charm of Hudson, NY, and the candle jars are made 20 minutes away in one direction, while the dishes are created 20 minutes in another. “It felt like time to expand the world of Presley Oldham,” he told me one recent afternoon while he was in NYC for a couple of days for work. “After the year of growth that the brand had, what with the CFDA and doing the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, I took a moment to think about how to sculpt my narrative, and to use my voice in different areas of design.”
The starting point for the collection was the candle, Sprout, deliciously scented with oud, cedar, cypress, vetiver, and clary sage essential oil. (Oldham burns oud and cedarwood incense at home, and the Sprout fragrance will also be available as his own incense.) But really the starting point is the glass holder which contains it; the glassblowers who made the candle vessels and some of Oldham’s beads are one and the same, an extension of the idea for him that home objects and jewelry. “Both have a sense of ritual around them; they bring comfort to people. Also, I obviously had to learn how to make candles,” he continued, laughing. “But ultimately everything I do is anchored in my memories and emotions.”
The scent, for instance, developed with Oldham’s friend Benjamin Lewellyn, who lives upstate near him; it was envisaged as being, he says, “a comforting and grounding scent; it brings me back to New Mexico and spending the summers there with my grandparents, being in the mountains and the dry dirt, and the rain passing through. Those are visceral emotions, so how do I anchor those in actual scent? The cedarwood has a very woody scent, while the oud has an umami quality to it. And then Ben suggested adding clary sage, as it’s less herbaceous, it has a mintiness to it.”
It’s this emotionally charged sense of inspiration which constantly colors Oldham’s work, and it’s what can make the ubiquity of the scented candle feel fresh and newly connective. Even while he was trying to capture the memory of the past through the scent of today, Oldham’s research started with a piece of long-form word association poetry to encourage the creative process. After dissecting his prose, he and Lewellyn smelled hundreds of different oils to narrow down the final mix.
The glass dishes, meanwhile, were derived from the masses of containers and holders massed across his workspace at home, the necessary detritus of being a jeweler. They can hold the rings he has just launched, but they’re also, says Oldham, “to burn sage in, or even put food on them, if you want. What unites everything he is launching though is, he says, “the way I’ve approached functionality and beauty and merged them together. To me that’s the truest expression of what I can do as a designer.”