Bliss Road Studios began at a dining room table in Sacramento's leafy Land Park neighborhood, with a stubborn belief: the things we live with every day deserve more joy than they usually get. A tea towel can be merely useful, or it can make you smile every time you dry your hands. We are firmly on the side of the smile.
My name is Gay. For most of my life I was a lawyer — decades of careful words in serious rooms. Beautiful things were the other thing, the quiet thing, the hour of the day that belonged entirely to color. When cancer treatment slowed my body down a few years ago, that hour is the one I kept — and the garden started coming indoors, one hydrangea, one lemon branch, one bluebird at a time. What began as an hour of joy became a studio. The studio became this shop.
Every Bliss Road design is created by the two of us — Ray and me, dreaming the patterns up together at this same table. I fuss over the florals, the citrus, and the blue-and-white; the bears in folk sweaters are Ray's, and you'll know them when you see them — as are all of the Scenic Route designs, every vista and view of them. Each design becomes a small family of useful things: a pillow, a tea towel, a mug, a tote — sometimes a pair of sneakers. Nothing is mass-made or warehoused. Each piece is printed to order in the USA and comes into the world only because you asked it to.
Bliss Road has a little sister, too. At GPS Pillow Shop, our other studio, the design is yours to make: a pillow printed with the coordinates of the place your heart calls home — the lake house, the college town, the spot where everything began — with your own words beneath. When you want the pattern already dreamed up, you’re in the right place; when you want it personal, that’s the shop to visit.
Joy is not a luxury. It is the everyday things — the mug you reach for, the pillow you lean on — that decide how a home feels. They may as well be beautiful.
A curated line, done well. Not everything makes the shop — every design here earned its spot, and when something new joins, something tired retires.
The garden wins. When in doubt, we add more flowers. It has not failed us yet.
Thank you for being here. It means more than you know.
— Gay
Bring home a little bliss.