Sanne Hamers: The Quiet Architect of Her Own Life

In a cultural moment that rewards relentless self-promotion, Sanne Hamers has built something rarer and more durable — a creative life shaped entirely on her own terms.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Information
Full Name	Sanne Lotto Hamers
Born	June 1987, Dronten, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch; dual Dutch-American
Known For	Stylist, creative entrepreneur, founder of Atelier Preserve
Education	TMO Fashion Business School (Netherlands); metal coating course, Boston
Career Highlights	Intern under celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe; personal stylist to Goldie Hawn; Director of Interior Design at Bird Rock Oasis; founder of Atelier Preserve (2024)
Marriage	Wyatt Russell (m. March 14, 2012 — separated March 2, 2015; divorce finalized December 2017)
Children	One son, Skipper (“Skippy”) Cassin Young, born 2021; second son Wick
Current Residence	San Diego, California
Business	Atelier Preserve — 3D sculpture and jewelry studio, San Diego
Social Media	Instagram: @design.by.sanne; @atelierpreserve
Estimated Net Worth	Approximately $1–2 million

The Woman Behind the Headlines

For years, Sanne Hamers existed in the public record as a footnote in someone else’s biography. She was tagged as the ex-wife, the Dutch stylist, the woman who once attended Hollywood premieres in a golden dress beside a famous name. That framing is both understandable and deeply incomplete.

What the headlines missed — and what a closer look reveals — is a woman who spent more than a decade building genuine expertise in creative work, quietly absorbing the textures of two different countries and two different industries. She moved from fashion styling to interior design to hands-on sculptural art, each pivot driven not by personal crisis but by honest curiosity.

The Sanne Hamers who stands in a San Diego studio today, hand-finishing a 3D-printed sculpture of a woman’s pregnant body, is not a reluctant public figure who survived her brush with fame. She is a craftsperson who made something entirely new from the fragments of an unusual life.

Dronten to Los Angeles: The Foundation Years

Sanne Hamers grew up in Dronten, a small planned city in the Flevoland province of the Netherlands — a place literally built from reclaimed land, a city of engineers and pragmatists. She spent her formative years in Amsterdam, absorbing that city’s particular aesthetic: bicycles over cars, function wrapped in beauty, a cultural ethos that values design not as decoration but as problem-solving.

Dutch culture left its mark on her professional instincts in ways she has articulated herself. Space, in the Netherlands, is precious. Homes there tend toward the compact and the deliberate, every object chosen to earn its place. That sensibility — what might be called a Dutch economy of attention — would later shape how she thought about fashion, interiors, and eventually the body itself as something worthy of careful, considered art.

She studied at TMO Fashion Business School, a Dutch institution focused on fashion business education. Her move to Los Angeles came at age 21, a young woman arriving in one of the world’s most image-saturated cities, carrying a European eye and little else in terms of connections or capital.

A Career Built From the Ground Up

The first professional chapter of Hamers’ American life unfolded not in front of cameras but beside them. She secured an internship with Rachel Zoe, one of Hollywood’s most recognized and demanding celebrity stylists — a professional environment where precision and discretion are equally required, and where the gap between a good eye and a great career is navigated daily in the space of a single outfit decision.

The Rachel Zoe studio was a significant education. Major designers, top-tier brands, editorial shoots for fashion magazines, and the controlled chaos of dressing public figures for major moments — Hamers absorbed all of it. She later described her own trajectory in a CanvasRebel interview, noting that after beginning as an intern she established herself as an independent fashion stylist, working with celebrities on red carpet appearances and press events while contributing to editorial work for prominent fashion publications.

From there, she made a move that was both professionally logical and personally unusual: she became the personal stylist for Goldie Hawn, the actress who would become her future mother-in-law. The relationship between Hamers and Hawn preceded and outlasted her marriage to Hawn’s son, Wyatt Russell. That professional longevity is itself a data point — trust earned through performance, not nepotism.

Her work with Hawn involved not just wardrobe choices but the full architecture of personal presentation: planning looks for public appearances, interviews, and red carpet events. Styling at that level requires something more than taste. It requires reading a client, understanding what they want to project and what they want to protect, and translating those instincts into clothing before the camera clicks.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

In 2010, Wyatt Russell was in the Netherlands playing professional ice hockey for the Groningen Grizzlies. He had reached Europe circuitously — five concussions had ended a promising North American hockey career and redirected him toward a continent where he could still play, and where the fame attached to his family name meant nothing at the rink.

Hamers met him at a salsa bar. She was still a student at the time. He was a young athlete far from home, not yet an actor, not yet recognizable to anyone beyond hockey circles. There was no Hollywood calculation in the meeting, no industry connection to nurture.

They began as two people who found each other interesting across a significant cultural gap. She has since described her early relationship with Russell as something built on ordinary moments — dancing, conversation, the novelty of learning each other’s worlds. He spoke to interviewers in later years about those Netherlands years as formative, a period when he discovered acting and built a sense of himself outside his famous parents’ shadow. Hamers was part of that formation.

The relationship deepened through Russell’s extended time in Europe, and when he eventually transitioned back to Los Angeles to pursue acting in earnest, Hamers made the decision to follow. She was not following a celebrity. She was following a man she knew before the cameras found him.

Marriage, Malibu, and the Russell-Hawn Orbit

Sanne Hamers and Wyatt Russell married on March 14, 2012, in Los Angeles. The ceremony was private, deliberately understated for two people stepping into one of Hollywood’s most photographed family networks. They settled into a mobile home in Malibu, sharing the space with Russell’s half-brother Boston Russell and their two dogs. The choice of a mobile home over a canyon mansion said something about their priorities, or at least their aspirations at the time.

Entering the Russell-Hawn family meant sudden proximity to Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson, and Oliver Hudson — a constellation of American celebrities that operates in a world where paparazzi are a weather condition rather than an occasional disruption. Hamers has spoken candidly about the disorientation of that adjustment. She was not accustomed to strangers photographing her simply because she stood beside a recognizable face. She found, over time, that the people inside that famous family were simply people — carrying the same ordinary concerns, arguments, and moments of joy as anyone else.

While the public saw a couple moving through glamorous events, those who knew the household saw something more modest: beach walks, home-cooked dinners, dogs, and a man whose ambitions were still crystallizing. Hamers continued her styling work throughout the marriage, developing her career independently while navigating the specific social pressures of belonging to a family whose private moments occasionally became public property.

She appeared publicly with Russell at major industry events, including the 23rd Screen Actors Guild Awards in January 2017, where photographs show them side by side, composed and cordial, even as their legal separation had already been filed nearly two years prior.

The Divorce: Quiet, Documented, and Final

On March 2, 2015, Sanne Hamers and Wyatt Russell formally separated. Court records in Los Angeles County Superior Court — filed at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse — show that Russell initiated the dissolution proceedings on April 26, 2017, citing irreconcilable differences. Hamers filed her response on May 2, 2017. The divorce reached its legal conclusion in December 2017.

The property division was practical and specific. Russell retained the Pacific Palisades mobile home and a 2014 Toyota Tundra truck. The settlement relieved him of responsibility for Hamers’ remaining student loans, approximately $25,000. She kept her personal wardrobe, jewelry, and — significantly — all creative work she had produced during the marriage: screenplays, scripts, story treatments, characters, and written ideas. Neither party sought spousal support. A judicial order directed Russell to pay Hamers $25,000.

The creative property clause is worth pausing on. It suggests that Hamers had been writing — developing intellectual property, generating ideas — throughout her years in Los Angeles. That detail rarely appears in the many articles that reduce her to a footnote in Russell’s biography. But it points to someone who was doing more behind the scenes than her public profile suggested.

After the divorce, Hamers made a deliberate retreat from visibility. No interviews, no public appearances, no verified social media activity tracking her movements. Russell, meanwhile, accelerated. His career took off after he landed parts in movies like Everybody Wants Some! (2016) and eventually into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), where he played the divisive John Walker / U.S. Agent. He married actress Meredith Hagner in August 2019, and they have since welcomed two sons.

The contrast in trajectories is not a verdict on either person. It is simply the shape that two lives took after a shared chapter ended.

Private Struggles, Personal Life, and the Path Back to Herself

What happened to Sanne Hamers between 2015 and her reemergence in San Diego as an artist and entrepreneur is, in large measure, her own private story. She has not submitted it for public consumption, and that restraint deserves to be respected rather than filled with speculation.

What she has disclosed — in her own voice, in interviews she chose to give about her business — is more revealing than any tabloid reconstruction. She speaks of experiencing multiple pregnancy losses before the birth of her first son. She talks of a time when she wanted to respect her own body and felt the difference between the image-focused environment she had worked in and the intensely private, physical reality of carrying and losing pregnancies.

That gap became the seed of Atelier Preserve. She found herself, during the COVID-19 pandemic, researching 3D scanning technology, purchasing a 3D printer, and renting a medical-grade scanner — teaching herself a manufacturing process that no one in the United States was offering in permanent studio form. The struggle was real and unglamorous. In one interview, she described how her 3D scanner’s specialized cable broke immediately before a session with a client who was 39 weeks pregnant. She troubleshot it herself.

She now lives in San Diego with her partner — identified in some reports as Joe Young — their two sons, Skipper (born 2021) and Wick, and two dogs named Splinter and Wade. On social media, she refers to herself as “Skippy’s and Wick’s goofy mom,” which reveals something crucial about how she has decided to structure her identity now that the organizing force is no longer someone else’s fame.

Atelier Preserve: Art From Loss

In January 2024, Sanne Hamers launched Atelier Preserve in San Diego, positioning it as the only permanent studio in the United States specializing in personalized 3D body sculptures. The concept, which she first encountered in the Netherlands, involves a five-minute in-studio 3D scan followed by a hand-finished sculptural piece — or custom 14k solid gold jewelry — delivered within weeks. Sculpture pricing begins at $599.

The technology is medical-grade. The finishing is artisanal. Before opening the studio, Hamers traveled to Boston to complete a specialized metal coating course — the only woman in a class of professionals from the fine painting, interior, and automotive industries. She built the manufacturing process entirely by herself, outsourcing only the gold casting for jewelry to a local San Diego goldsmith.

What makes Atelier Preserve more than a technically interesting business is what drove its creation. Hamers has described the birth of the concept in terms that are precise and unguarded: she had suffered losses, she wanted to mark her body’s capacity for life, and she found that traditional maternity photography — with its styled hair and curated settings — felt inauthentic to someone who had spent years working behind cameras. A sculpture felt more permanent. More honest.

That personal origin story infuses the business. Client testimonials on the Atelier Preserve website describe women who created sculptures before mastectomies, who wanted to preserve a pregnant body that had carried them through difficulty, who intended to pass the pieces down to grandchildren. Hamers has also collaborated with photographer Renata Lutz on a project called “Maternity Shoot Redefined,” pairing fine art photography with custom 3D sculptures.

She has built an affiliate network with San Diego birth centers, prenatal chiropractors, and newborn photographers. She trains partner businesses to conduct scans themselves, then receives the files and handles manufacturing. The model is expanding beyond San Diego, a deliberate geographic move outward from a business she built entirely alone during one of the most disorienting periods in modern history.

Her LinkedIn lists her education at TMO Fashion Business School and her role as owner and artist at Atelier Preserve. Her Google rating is a perfect 5.0. She also holds the title of Director of Interior Design at Bird Rock Oasis, reflecting the continued expansion of her design work beyond fashion.

The Stylist’s Eye: A Career in Three Acts

Sanne Hamers’ professional identity has evolved through three distinct phases, each building on the last without abandoning it. The first was fashion styling — the Rachel Zoe internship, the editorial work, the red carpet preparation, the years dressing Goldie Hawn and developing a professional reputation grounded in trust and discretion.

The second was interior design. In her own account, exposure to extraordinary homes during her styling years redirected her attention. Great private collections, carefully curated rooms, objects chosen for meaning rather than trend — she found that world as compelling as fashion, and eventually moved into it professionally. Her role at Bird Rock Oasis reflects this transition.

The third phase is Atelier Preserve: a fusion of her Dutch design sensibility, her 15 years in creative industries, her experience with loss, and her capacity for technical self-teaching. She describes these convergences herself, noting that the combination of European upbringing, creative industry experience, and motherhood brought her to the specific form her studio now takes.

Throughout each phase, the through-line has been working with her hands and her eye in service of how people present themselves — and how they preserve what matters. Fashion styling is, at root, a practice of helping someone inhabit their own skin with intention. Sculpture, in Hamers’ version of it, is the same thing at a deeper level. She has spent 15 years, in different materials, doing the same essential work.

The Weight of Association — and the Work of Escaping It

Sanne Hamers did not choose to become publicly recognizable. Visibility arrived through association, and it attached to her in ways she had no framework to anticipate or manage. Moving from a Dutch student life to the periphery of one of Hollywood’s most photographed families is a jarring relocation — not just geographically but psychologically.

She has spoken, with some humor and some candor, about the specific strangeness of Los Angeles life as she first encountered it: the ubiquity of Botox, the dog daycares on every corner, the reflex of strangers reaching for cameras when they recognize a face nearby. These observations are not complaints. They are the honest notes of someone trying to make sense of a new social vocabulary.

The more significant adjustment was one she has not narrated in detail publicly: the experience of building a life inside someone else’s story. As Wyatt Russell’s career ascended — as he moved from supporting roles to Marvel prestige — Hamers remained in a supporting role in the narrative about their relationship, and then about their divorce, and then about who she was afterward. The internet’s version of her life was constructed almost entirely by people who had never spoken with her.

What she chose, in response, was absence. Not bitterness, not counter-narrative, not a media tour to reclaim her identity. Absence, followed by quiet construction of something new. That is not the most dramatic choice available to someone in her position. It may be the most difficult.

Legacy and Influence: Redefining What Comes After

Sanne Hamers lacks a traditional celebrity legacy, including a filmography, an easily cataloged cultural item, and an award shelf. What she has is something more diffuse and perhaps more durable: a demonstration that creative life does not require continuous visibility to generate genuine value.

Her Atelier Preserve studio fills a real gap. As of 2024, no permanent studio in the United States offered 3D body sculpture in the form she has developed. She identified the gap through personal experience, developed the technical capacity to fill it, and built a business model that now extends beyond San Diego through partnerships with other women-owned businesses in the maternity sector.

Her client testimonials carry emotional weight that press releases cannot manufacture. Women describe their sculptures as the most meaningful objects they own — keepsakes made before surgeries, during difficult pregnancies, as testimony to bodies that carried them through experiences they needed to mark. Hamers created a commercial product that doubles as a form of witness.

Her influence on the broader culture is subtle but traceable: she models a specific kind of creative resilience that is increasingly legible to women navigating the particular challenges of building professional identity alongside and after major relationships. She did not leverage her brief public exposure for further public exposure. She used the time and privacy she reclaimed to develop a genuine craft.

The jewelry she makes from 3D scans — cast in 14k gold by a local San Diego goldsmith — is literally worn by clients who want to carry the shape of their own bodies with them. There is something quietly profound in that: a Dutch designer, trained in fashion, teaching American women to wear themselves.

Final Words

Sanne Hamers defies the arc that her early public story seemed to predict. She appeared in tabloids as an adjunct to a famous surname and disappeared from them as a postscript to a divorce. The story the press wrote for her was complete by 2017. She declined to live it.

What she has built instead — across fashion, interiors, and now sculptural art — represents something that resists easy summary. It is not a comeback, because she never fully arrived in the first place. It is not reinvention, because the continuity of her aesthetic sensibility runs unbroken from her Dutch upbringing through every professional chapter. It is, more accurately, an accumulation: of skill, of loss, of technical knowledge acquired in a Boston classroom full of men who were surprised to see her there, of a willingness to start a manufacturing process from scratch during a pandemic, alone.

She is a mother of two, an artist, a small business owner in San Diego who achieves a perfect Google rating by making something irreplaceable. She is also, still, the kind of person who does not want the camera aimed at her. The women who sit in her studio for a five-minute scan and leave with something they will keep forever have found someone who understands, from the inside, what it means to want a record of yourself that you control.

That is the point of Atelier Preserve. That may also be the point of her life.

FAQs

1. Who is Sanne Hamers?

Sanne Hamers is a Dutch-born stylist, creative entrepreneur, and artist based in San Diego, California. She is best known in public circles as the former wife of actor Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Independently, she built a 15-year career across fashion styling, editorial work, and interior design, and in 2024 founded Atelier Preserve, a 3D sculpture and jewelry studio.

2. Where was Sanne Hamers born?

She was born in June 1987 in Dronten, a city in the Flevoland province of the Netherlands. She spent significant time in Amsterdam during her formative years before relocating to Los Angeles at age 21.

3. How did Sanne Hamers and Wyatt Russell meet?

They met in 2010 at a salsa bar in the Netherlands. Russell was playing professional ice hockey for the Groningen Grizzlies at the time, and Hamers was still a student. Their relationship developed over months of shared time in Europe before she eventually relocated to the United States with him.

4. When did Sanne Hamers and Wyatt Russell marry?

They married on March 14, 2012, in a private ceremony in Los Angeles. During the marriage, they lived in a mobile home in Malibu with Russell’s half-brother Boston and their two dogs.

5. Why did Sanne Hamers and Wyatt Russell divorce?

Court filings in Los Angeles County Superior Court cite irreconcilable differences as the grounds for dissolution. They formally separated on March 2, 2015. Russell filed for divorce in April 2017; the proceedings were finalized in December 2017.

6. What did Sanne Hamers keep in the divorce settlement?

According to publicly referenced court documents, Hamers kept her personal clothing, jewelry, artwork, and — notably — all creative works she had produced, including screenplays, story treatments, scripts, and written ideas. She also received a court-ordered payment of $25,000. Neither party sought spousal support.

7. Did Wyatt Russell and Sanne Hamers have children together?

No. The couple did not have children during their marriage.

8. Does Sanne Hamers have children now?

Yes. She has two sons with her current partner. Her son Skipper, known as “Skippy,” was born in 2021. Her younger son is named Wick. In her own social media posts, she has referred to herself as “Skippy’s and Wick’s goofy mom.”

9. What is Atelier Preserve?

Atelier Preserve is a 3D scan and art studio Hamers founded in San Diego in January 2024. It is described as the only permanent studio of its kind in the United States, specializing in personalized 3D-printed sculptures of the human body — particularly pregnancy — as well as custom 14k solid gold jewelry derived from the same scans. Sculpture pricing starts at $599.

10. What inspired Sanne Hamers to create Atelier Preserve?

She has described the inspiration in her own words: after experiencing multiple pregnancy losses, she wanted to capture her pregnant body in a meaningful, lasting way. She encountered the concept of 3D body sculpture in the Netherlands but found no equivalent service in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she taught herself the technical process — buying a 3D printer, renting a medical-grade scanner, and prototyping extensively — before opening the studio.

11. Did Sanne Hamers work as Goldie Hawn’s personal stylist?

Yes. Multiple consistent sources confirm that she worked as Goldie Hawn’s personal stylist, a role that covered outfit planning for public appearances, red carpet events, and interviews. The professional relationship reportedly continued even after her divorce from Wyatt Russell, indicating a level of trust built on genuine professional merit.

12. Where did Sanne Hamers train as a stylist?

She attended TMO Fashion Business School in the Netherlands and, after relocating to Los Angeles, began her American career as an intern at Rachel Zoe’s studio — one of Hollywood’s most prominent styling operations. She later completed a specialized metal coating course in Boston before opening Atelier Preserve.

13. What is Sanne Hamers’ estimated net worth?

Multiple sources estimate her net worth at approximately $1–2 million, derived from over 15 years of work in fashion styling, editorial projects, private consulting, interior design, and her current entrepreneurial venture. Exact figures are not publicly confirmed.

14. Is Sanne Hamers on social media?

She maintains Instagram accounts under @design.by.sanne and @atelierpreserve. Her social media presence focuses primarily on her creative work and glimpses of family life rather than personal commentary or public debate.

15. What happened to Sanne Hamers after her divorce?

She stepped back from public visibility after the 2017 divorce, continued working in styling and interior design, relocated to San Diego, began a new relationship, and eventually became a mother. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted her to develop the 3D sculpture concept that became Atelier Preserve, which she launched in early 2024. She now operates the studio alongside consulting work in styling and interior design.

Connecting curious minds with stories that educate, inspire, and inform with The Editorial Times.