The Woman Behind the Treasures: Introducing The Wren’s Founder, Lori Bate
Lori Bate has lived a life filled with art, design, architecture, travel, and history since she was a child growing up in New Hampshire. Her experiences in these areas inform the artisanal products and artists who make up The Wren’s portfolio. While her interests heavily influence what bespoke products she brings back to her clients from around the world, there is also a deep care for those artisans and their communities at the core of the business.
While traveling abroad, Bate immerses herself in the culture and finds the best each country has to offer. She brings only those premier luxury goods into The Wren’s fold while connecting the artisans who make them with high-end designers and collectors in the U.S. She also cares for the communities from which these artisans arise. Case in point: the artists’ collaborative, Ecoarts Amazōnia, from the Brazilian rainforest, works with preeminent and historic porcelain and crystal maker Vista Alegre to produce the Amazōnia tableware collection. Bate found this resource on her travels and was delighted that adding the porcelain to her home and her customers’ homes supports reforestation of the Amazon where the artists live and work.
“I derive joy in beautiful, meaningful, and premium quality objects,” says Bate. “I am interested in finding the highest expression of an art form and discovering how artists manipulate different materials. I also like to see how other cultures celebrate everyday rituals and make them special.”
Bate continues to travel extensively—an interest she has had her entire life. Now, she brings her special finds and access to the artists who make them back to The Wren from locales worldwide.
Bate also supports her local community in Charleston, SC, by serving on the board of directors of Yo Art, an organization that introduces media arts curricula and related technology programs into the public schools.
Bate strives to bring the stories behind each artist and their work to The Wren. It may be helpful to understand her story and why she is attracted to particular home design products and artisans. Her heritage is multicultural, with roots in Iceland, Denmark, England, Germany, and Canada. She, along with her parents and three siblings, often attended theater and Boston Ballet performances. She was heavily influenced by her grandmother, who traveled to far-flung places such as Cambodia and New Guinea, bringing back treasures when she returned. Her grandmother was also an artist and pianist, both of which Bate picked up as hobbies along the way. While in college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and later at the University of Virgina, she earned bachelor’s degrees in studio art and American history, a master’s degree in architecture, and continued participating in athletic events such as rowing with the varsity crew team. She studied abroad in Rome and Venice, Italy, which contributed to her interest in Old World craftsmanship and architecture.
Bate’s career path influences her work at The Wren today. She has worked for two architecture firms—The Architect’s Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she participated on a team at Baghdad University in Iraq, and Boston-based Michael Dennis & Associates. After her foray into architecture, she studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and later founded two entrepreneurial fashion-based companies.
Since founding The Wren, Bate continues to draw, paint, practice photography, and participate in athletic endeavors. While she is thrilled with the new artisans she finds on each of her trips abroad, she also prizes an inherited library from her grandmother of complete volumes of Shakespeare and other classics, such as Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, volumes of European and Asian art books, and books of poetry from classical writers. She continues a commitment to preserving artisanal craftsmanship wherever it is taking place in the world, while adding the traditions and sharing the stories of those works by folding them into The Wren’s portfolio.
