ELLIE BENOV OF MARSEILLE BLUE, AT HOME
Inside the Highland Park home where the brand began.
SANCTUARIES LA EXPLORES THE QUIETER SIDE OF LOS ANGELES THROUGH DESIGN.
ROOTED IN THE BELIEF THAT SANCTUARY EXISTS EVERYWHERE, OFTEN HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT.
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I first met Ellie Benov at Tea at Shiloh in downtown LA, where she was Program Director and I was teaching a workshop. Later I read her natal chart — and her partner Will’s. It's been a joy to watch her build Marseille Blue, a Franco-Japanese vintage homeware and onsen-inspired bath brand rooted in the cultures and rituals she grew up with.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMY AQUINO
Ellie Benov lives at the top of a hill in Highland Park with her fiancé Will Simon and their chocolate lab named Romeo. She calls it her urban cabin — vaulted ceilings, dark wood beams, a fireplace, a balcony looking out over the city.
Three years in, she’s still slowly figuring out what she wants the place to feel like. She’s not in a hurry. “We’ve taken our time decorating our home… I need to spend a lot of time in a place to figure out what I want it to look and feel like.”
That patience is the whole spirit of Marseille Blue, the home and bath brand she founded last year. The brand started as a curation of vintage home goods sourced from Japan and France, the two countries Ellie says have shaped her most. Then came the bath line, which is now the center of the work.
Ellie was born and raised in New York and lived in stretches across Cape Town, Hawaii, Japan, and Italy through her early twenties. LA wasn’t originally part of the plan. A job offer brought her west in 2022 to help open Tea at Shiloh, a late-night teahouse downtown, and she stayed.
She talks about her home the way some people talk about a long relationship: as a slow accumulation of the right things. “The homes that resonate with me the most are the ones where you can tell so much about the person who lives there, just by looking around.”
The focal point of her own home is a hanging bookshelf that holds their most-loved books, alongside Ellie’s family altar of heirlooms and travel keepsakes. She’s drawn to objects that come with stories already attached.
The bath line is the part of Marseille Blue that feels most personal. Ellie is half Japanese, and her early life included regular trips to the bathhouses of Japan with her mother and obachan. “From the early days of conceptualizing Marseille Blue, I knew that at the heart of it, I wanted to honor and weave in Japanese bathing rituals that have added so much richness to my life.”
Last November she launched Hinoki Mineral Bath — a mineral-rich powder formulated after a specific hot spring in northern Japan known for its healing properties. She spent months developing it. She is particular about what goes in: no filler ingredients, nothing overly fragranced. “This bath powder turns the water milky-white and is packed with minerals that help to release muscle tension, remineralize your skin, and calm your nervous system. Plus, it smells like a Japanese bathhouse in the forest. I don’t go a night without it.”
Marseille Blue is a family project. The manufacturer is a small female-operated team in the town next to her grandparents’ home in Japan. Her mom handles operations. Will helps with the design. The salts come in traditional Japanese rice paper pouches, biodegradable, with individually sealed aluminum inserts to keep them fresh. Everything is assembled by hand.
What strikes me most about Ellie is how seamlessly the loop closes. The bathing rituals of her childhood carry directly into her life now, and the brand she's built honoring that ritual.
The latest expression of that care is Still Life — twenty-two objects sourced across Japan and Korea, chosen for what she calls their quiet presence in a room. It’s a phrase that could describe the home, the brand, or her.
Asked how to bring more intention into a home, Ellie keeps coming back to one idea: a home should feel unmistakably like the people who live in it.
It’s the kind of advice that sounds simple until you try to take it.
Photography Jeremy Aquino
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.