A small studio in Charleston, making things slowly.
Isla Solutions began on a kitchen table in Charleston in 2024 with a single candle and the conviction that home goods should be made the way our grandparents made them — slowly, by hand, in a quantity small enough to sign.
The first cohort
Our founder, Isla Marais, spent six summers in Cap d’Antibes as a child — old stone houses with cool tile floors, a kitchen rack of olive oil from the village press, and rough linen sheets that softened more with every laundry. Years later, working in publishing in Manhattan, she could not find anything in any New York shop that felt the way that house had felt. The candles were too sweet. The linens were too crisp. The ceramics had no weight.
So she made a candle herself. Then a vase. Then a single throw, woven by a small mill in North Carolina. The first cohort — 240 candles, 60 vases, 40 throws — shipped in May 2024 from her kitchen.
What we make
Isla today is a five-room range. Candles & Diffusers. Ceramics & Vases. Linens & Throws. Bath & Soap. Tabletop. We do not do trend pieces. We do not do seasonal collections. We do an annual refresh — a small cohort each spring and autumn — and the rest is the permanent range.
The range is short on purpose. We make one vase, in two sizes. We make three candle scents, in two sizes. We make two colourways of linen, in five products. The whole catalog is twenty-something pieces. That is a feature, not a constraint.
Where we make it
Everything we make is made in the United States or Western Europe. The candles, vases, and linens are made in our Charleston studio by a team of seven. The bar soap is hand-cut in Portugal at a fifth-generation castile-soap house. The wool comes from a single co-operative of small flocks in western North Carolina. The Belgian linen comes from a mill in Kortrijk that has been weaving flax since 1858.
We sign and number every cohort. We list our suppliers on every product page. We use plastic-free packaging — kraft cartons, paper-tape seals, wood-wool fill, and a hand-lettered card.
Where we are going
Slowly. We will not be in 200 shops next year. We are choosing one or two boutiques per US city — Charleston, Atlanta, Asheville, Brooklyn — to carry the range alongside this site. We will not wholesale to chains. We will not drop a “summer collection.” We will keep making the range better.
Thank you for being here.
— Isla & the Charleston team