Agraria founders Maurice Gibson
and Stanford Stevenson, 1973
The Nob Hill Shop
1156 Taylor Street, San Francisco
Agraria Products, 1985
Many Agraria fans have fond memories dating back to 1970 of discovering our Taylor Street shop on Nob Hill... an eclectic mix of antiques, books, and one-of-a-kind gifts; and of course, filled with aromatic Agraria potpourri, candles, incense, sachets, and bath & body products.
Agraria has always been "wrapped-and-ready-to-give," and beginning in the 1980s, the products were packaged in hand-woven palm leaf boxes. Even the candle had a woven case and lid... the inspiration for our new Woven Crystal Candles.
Today you can find a wide variety of Agraria fragrances & products in the finest shops around the world... from San Francisco, to Shanghai, Miami to Milan, Dublin to Dubai, and London to Los Angeles. And for you world travelers, when you check into InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts worldwide, you will find the bathrooms filled with our Lemon Verbena bath and body products.
Town & Country Magazine, 1993
Long before anyone talked about "going green," Agraria was packaging potpourri, candles, soap bars, sachets and burning sticks in woven palm leaf containers from Indonesia.
To quote a 1993 Town & Country feature on Agraria, "For the serious aesthete who has everything, there's politically correct Agraria potpourri. It's actually been around for a while." Later in the story, Agraria founder Stanford Stevenson states, "Use of the palm leaves helps support the rain forest and that area's local economy." To this day, we continue to hear about customers that have kept the candle case as a treasured decorative object. But the pièce de résistance was the round hat box filled with 8 liters of potpourri. They still smell like Agraria, making it hard to throw away.
Discovering these containers in the archives inspired us to create
The Woven Crystal Candle Collection.
