Meet the Maker: Savapile, the Woman Behind the Straw

There's a basement in Athens that smells like sunshine, if that's possible.

Stacks of straw waiting to become something. Hats in every stage of becoming: some just a shape on a mold, some finished and sitting proud on a shelf, some still holding the memory of the head they were made for.

I found this place because I found Lisa first, on Instagram, and something told me before I'd even messaged her that this was going to matter.

It started, as the best things often do, with almost nothing. In the early 1960s, Lisa's father, Savvas Sarigiannidis, began making straw hats on the beach at Salamis. No workshop, no proper equipment, just a pot and a pan pressed into service as molds, and a talent that people noticed. Word travelled the way it does on a Greek beach, quickly and by mouth, and before long Savvas had outgrown the sand and opened a workshop in the middle of Athens.

That workshop is Lisa's now. She grew up in it, the way some children grow up in a kitchen or a garden, absorbing a craft before they know they're learning it. When I visited, she gave us an afternoon she didn't have to give: hat after hat pulled down from the shelves, each one a little different, and then the bags, which I was not prepared for. Funky is the only word. Structured and playful at once, nothing like the straw bags you've seen everywhere else.

Lisa doesn't just keep her father's hats alive, she keeps making new ones. Every year there's something new alongside the classics, the Rialto, the Bucket, the Visor. And then there's the Orbit, which might be the boldest thing in the whole workshop: a hat so large you can vanish behind it entirely. I didn't plan to fall for a hat that could hide my whole face, and yet.

Lisa is honest about the harder part of this story. The craft of straw-hat making is disappearing, pushed out by cheap paper imitations, and workshops like hers are becoming rarer every year. Her advice to anyone starting out is simple: follow your passion, be persistent, try hard if you love what you do. I think about that a lot, because it's exactly what keeps a place like this alive when it would be so much easier to stop.

This is the part of curating I love most, and the part that takes the longest to explain in one sentence, which is why I gave it a whole page instead. A hat from Savapile isn't just something to keep the sun off your face. It's a family, a basement in Athens, a father's beach-side invention, a daughter's eclectic eye, and sixty years of not giving up. When you wear one, you're wearing all of that too.

The Savapile pieces, the Orbit included, are with us now, in the shop on Poros and online. 

With love from Poros,

Anouck

my perfectly imperfect way of curating.