THE STORY BEHIND SANCTUARY ATELIER

About Sanctuary Atelier

In the modern world, everything is expected to last unchanged. Sanctuary Atelier returns to an original rhythm, where colour is alive, shifting with time, wear, and light, rather than being fixed or controlled. This is how nature has designed it.

Sanctuary Atelier is a natural dye studio rooted in a slower way of making, where colour is drawn directly from plants, minerals, and time. What begins in the field or garden moves through water, heat, gravity, and patience, until it settles into textile in its own way.

Sanctuary refers to the place within all of us that is pure, untouched, and full of joy – the feeling that the founder experiences when she engages with this wondrous, ancient craft, and which is accessible to all.

Our studio and practice exists in contrast to a culture that prioritises speed and permanence. Instead, it offers something more responsive, connected, and attuned. We create textile that is worn, lived with, and allowed to change, adorned with colour that belongs to the Earth and gradually finds its place in your life.

FOUNDER, SANCTUARY ATELIER

Anette Moolenaar

Founder Anette Moolenaar came to this craft through a growing awareness that so much of what surrounds us is made to be fast, fixed, and uniform. During a time in her life where much of her daily work happened behind screens, she found herself drawn to the natural world in a much more deliberate way. She stumbled upon the ancient practice of natural dyeing in a newspaper, and immediately, it felt like a recognition of something somehow already familiar. When she found some fallen branches from a cherry blossom tree and eventually extracted a beautiful plum colour from them, her life was changed.

Anette believes that natural dyeing is not difficult or something out of reach, but it can take many moons and much trial and error to get truly familiar with a plant, its intricacies, and the many layers of pigment that it is able to offer. Anette feels a deep sense of passion and purpose to share all the knowledge, insights, and methods she has gained over the years through her own experience to make this practice accessible to a wider audience. After all, wisdom is not owned, but carried.

This craft is shaped by traditions that span cultures and generations, many of them rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems that understood how to draw lasting colour from the natural world. At Sanctuary Atelier, we approach this lineage with respect and ongoing study, aware that this work is not new, only re-entering modern life in a different context.

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