EPISODE 148 - SAANA BAKER

The Textile Eye is creation of Saana Baker, a veteran textile designer with bi-coastal and international experience designing and sourcing upholstery, bedding, rugs, and tabletop. Over her 25 year career, she has helped craft lines for Schumacher, Barbara Barry, David Phoenix and Jiun Ho, and has acted as guest art director on more than a few licensed lines for name designers. Saana’s work has been used in the White House State Dining Room as drapery, and featured in publications such as Architectural Digest, Home Textiles Today & House Beautiful. Saana lives in San Francisco with her husband Matt, a NASA robotics engineer. In addition to her ongoing love affair with textiles, she spends time restoring her 1890’s Victorian fixer-upper, hosting dinner parties, and experimenting with linocut and collage. To learn more about Saana’s consulting and how you can work together, visit her website. Known for her beautiful and meticulous work, Saana Baker studied textile design with an emphasis on weaving at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Eight great years in New York followed, working at domestic upholstery mills and as the Director of Woven Design for the august fabric house Schumacher.  The opportunity to work with Barbara Barry then took her to Los Angeles, where she spent more than a decade actualizing the vision of this iconic and brilliant designer. There she broadened her skills to include rugs, bedding, wallpaper, dinnerware, as well as showroom and photo styling. Now, back home in San Francisco, Saana is focusing on new clients including Jiun Ho, McGuire Furniture, and David Phoenix, along with other thoughtful, creative firms and discerning private clients. Her inspirations date back to childhood. From an early age, Saana loved her grandmother’s elegant home filled with antiques and eclectic items picked up traveling as a military wife. It offered a contrasting aesthetic from her Berkeley upbringing, helmed by two iconoclastic parents devoted to paths of free-thinking and change-making. Seeing both sides helped her develop a broad set of references and an impulse to work toward balancing beauty and substance. The sense of joy found in a home filled with things that truly speak to its inhabitants is a key inspiration and guiding philosophy. http://www.saanabaker.com/ https://www.thetextileeye.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_textile_eye/