A Northern California brand that started in the nursery.

Serena & Lily is a home-furnishings brand based in Sausalito, California. It was launched in 2003 by Serena Dugan, a painter and designer, and Lily Kanter, an entrepreneur. Business of Home, writing on 20 January 2026 after an episode of its podcast with Dugan, said the partnership began when Dugan pitched her paintings, artwork and textiles to Kanter and the two decided to work together. A press release issued by the lender ORIX Ventures on 27 March 2013 also gave the founding year as 2003 and described the company as a Sausalito-based lifestyle brand selling textiles, furniture and décor for every room in the house.

Kanter’s own account adds detail and a different date. A biography published by the Skoll Foundation says she had held roles at Microsoft, Deloitte & Touche and IBM before leaving Microsoft in late 2000; that year she appeared on the cover of Time for a story on “The New Philanthropists.” The biography says that in 2002 she opened Mill Valley Baby & Kids, a home-furnishings business for babies. That biography says she met Serena Dugan there in 2004, and it describes Kanter as a co-founder and board member of Serena & Lily. The brand’s web address was live by July 2004, when the Internet Archive captured a simple page titled “serena and lily” in lower-case letters.

The baby shop explains the brand’s starting point. According to Business of Home, Serena & Lily began as a nursery bedding brand. Dugan’s textile designs went on to crib bedding, and the range then followed its customers as their children grew: bedding for older children, then for guest rooms and adults, then upholstery fabrics and sofas. The order of that growth, from a baby’s room outwards to the rest of the house, is part of the company’s founding story as Dugan told it.

From textiles to a whole-house brand, and from catalogue pages to Design Shops.

By the time of the 2013 ORIX Ventures announcement, Serena & Lily was describing itself as a brand for every room. The lender said it had committed growth capital to support the company’s continued expansion, and the company’s chief financial officer, Phil Neri, described the arrangement as a debt facility.

Dugan later stepped back. Business of Home reported that she left the company she had co-founded to return to painting and to her artistic roots, which she described as restorative. In the same conversation she reflected that the business had moved from artistry towards what would sell, and that she felt she had drifted from artistry too. She also observed that fabric brands now compete in a crowded field, often using the same linens and the same printers, so that a brand has to stand out through its look or through the way it reaches its audience. After several years of painting she returned to the market in 2020 with Serena Dugan Studio, a boutique textile business that works mainly with the design trade; she told the podcast host, Dennis Scully, that a visit to Studio Four in New York had sparked the idea, and she described the studio as a place to experiment, make mistakes and learn. Her view of what makes a strong brand, as the magazine summarised it, is a combination of a distinct point of view and essential basics: customers buy the basics because they respect the point of view. Kanter, for her part, went on to found Boon Supply Co., which the Skoll biography says launched in spring 2018, while remaining on the Serena & Lily board.

The brand has also moved into physical retail. In Westport, Connecticut, its Design Shop occupies the Kemper-Gunn House on Elm Street, a house built in 1889. Westport Magazine, writing on 1 May 2026 to mark the shop’s anniversary, said the building had narrowly escaped demolition before local advocates relocated and restored it, and that its hand-carved staircase and stained-glass windows survive. The shop opened in 2016, the magazine said.

The same article described how the Design Shops work. The Westport shop is led by Ruth Ann Davids, and Allyson McGrath is the company’s executive vice-president of Design Shops.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell furniture and home goods mainly at a distance, through printed catalogues, websites or both. Some started as mail-order businesses that posted catalogues to customers’ homes; others began online and never printed a catalogue at all. Several belong to larger retail groups, and a single company can run more than one of these names side by side, each aimed at a different taste or budget.

Because the customer usually meets the brand before seeing any product in person, a distance retailer’s identity is carried largely by its name, its photography, its catalogue or website layout and, more recently, by the physical stores that some of these businesses have begun to open. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and who actually makes what it sells.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Natural materials, a breezy palette and a painter’s hand.

The core of Serena & Lily’s identity is the combination in its name: a painter’s eye and a retailer’s discipline. The brand began with Dugan’s textiles, and Business of Home traces the business back to the paintings, artwork and fabric designs she first showed to Kanter. In the same interview Dugan returned to the idea of point of view as the thing that makes customers trust a brand’s basics.

Westport Magazine summed up the brand’s look in May 2026 as one built on natural materials, a breezy palette and craftsmanship, and quoted the description “optimistic, livable.” The company’s headquarters are in Sausalito, in Marin County, while the Westport shop sits in a restored nineteenth-century house on the East Coast.

For a design guide, Serena & Lily shows how a home brand built on a painter’s textiles can grow into a whole-house identity while keeping a clear sense of place. Compare Pottery Barn, the Williams-Sonoma home brand, and West Elm, its modern sister. For this guide we use harbour navy, bay blue and sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Serena & Lily’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.