After running an antique store in San Francisco for a number of years, the founder and creator behind The Mermaid’s Palace, Kari Lobdell felt dissatisfied and craved a change. “I realized it was because I wasn’t doing anything creative, really. I wasn’t actively creating anymore,” she says about the motivation behind her switch from antique dealer to maker of handcrafted home products. 

Gravitating towards materials found in nature, she originally started making different home decor items from seashells--hence the nautical name--until she found her competitive edge in a material of a more grounded variety: quartz crystal. “I made a pair of quartz crystal lamps to a show, and everyone just loved those and sort of ignored everything else I was making, so I started going down that path.” The lamps she now painstakingly creates out of her countryside studio are handmade and highly ornamental made from quartz she buys from the US and Brazil. After sorting through metric tons of crystals, Kari builds the lamps one stone at a time, drying them in between each application, making for a time-consuming process but a completely one-of-a-kind product.