About Summer House Soaps

Who are we? Summer House Natural Soaps is a family business rooted in our 200-year-old house and barn on beautiful Cape Cod. It's a great place to raise flowers, herbs, chickens, children, and of course, to make soap. We draw our inspiration and some of our fresh ingredients from our own gardens, the surrounding pine forests and cranberry bogs, and the sea coast just a few steps away.

How do we make soap? All our soap is carefully made in small batches using the cold-process method which best preserves the beneficial qualities of our ingredients. Using the highest-quality vegetable oils, we mix our batters by hand and pour them into wooden molds which are wrapped in blankets for three days while the alchemy of saponification unfolds. After the soap sets, the bars are cut, cured for three weeks to further develop mildness, and beautifully wrapped in handmade papers. We think you will enjoy using our soaps as much as we enjoy making them.

What makes our soap so special? Many people never go back to commercial soap once they experience the sensation of hand-made soap. It is truly a different, and dare we say a more sensual product. To understand why, just compare the list of ingredients on a bar of commercially-made soap with our own ingredients. We start with food-grade olive oil, which makes a particularly mild and moisturizing bar. To that we add coconut oil for rich lather, palm oil for long-lasting hardness, and other oils and butters chosen for their skin-conditioning properties. As a byproduct of the soapmaking process, the finished bar also contains 25% glycerine, a humectant that attracts moisture to the skin. (Glycerine is what gives your skin that satiny feeling after you bathe.) To our base batter, we add a whole range of additions, including oatmeal, honey, buttermilk, cocoabutter, healing herbs and botanical oils, exfoliants, mineral colors and more. The result is a face and body soap that's luxurious, long lasting, mild, and deliciously scented.