A Family Affair
Deep Read #53 with Salter House founder, Sandeep Salter
PSA: This Wednesday June 17th, I’m hosting a Book Club with Byredo at Liberty London. I’ll be sharing my cherished summer reads and would love to hear yours. Tickets include a Byredo goodie bag and refreshments, get yours here. [I also have a few complimentary spots for paying subscribers – RSVP info below the paywall below.)
Deep Read #53 is with a friend who is like family to me: Sandeep Salter, co-founder of Salter House and the woman behind the cotton nightdresses that inspired a thousand imitators. (I wore the Jodie in the final months of my pregnancy and it was perfect.)
Listen to Deep Read #53 on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Sandeep and I met on the first day of secondary school in London and I spent a formative chunk of my teenage years in her family home. Then and now, I was warmed and inspired by the closeness between Sandeep, her parents, and her older sister Sita – something that only strengthened when Sandeep became a mother herself at the tender age of 24.
Sandeep has lived in New York since her university days and her CV is a Google Map of the most distinctive independent businesses in the city. She got her start in the world of books — at Printed Matter, the legendary artists’ books institution in NYC’s Chelsea, and then as a buyer at beloved Nolita bookstore, McNally Jackson. She later co-founded the stationery store Goods for the Study and the perfectly curated Picture Room, before turning her focus to Salter House: a family business she runs with her husband Carson, which started life as a resource for sustainable homewares and has evolved into a fully-fledged clothing brand.
In this episode, we talk about the in-built discipline that comes with growing up as the child of dancers, the efficiency of feeling good in your skin, and Sandeep’s commitment to building something at her own pace in a city that champions speed above all. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Phoebe
Sandeep Salter: Deep Reading List
“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”
Uncanny Valley: Seduction and Disillusionment in San Francisco’s Startup Scene, Anna Wiener
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“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion
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Image from A Golden Thread: The Prutscher Collection of Viennese Children’s Books 1900-1938