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Our Practice

How a gift gets to the table.

Four chapters. The hands behind each.

I.

Choosing a house.

Curatorial standards before commerce. We do not buy from catalogs. We visit. We meet the maker. We decline more houses than we welcome.

Six standards we apply, in order

  1. 01Family-owned or founder-led, with at least one generation in.
  2. 02Low-volume, even where high-volume would be possible.
  3. 03Material transparency: where it comes from, who makes it, why.
  4. 04Cultural depth: a piece that outlives a hundred years of use.
  5. 05Discretion: the house does not mass-mail.
  6. 06Geographic conviction. We know where it was made.

We will buy two pieces from a house we have visited before we will buy two hundred from one we have not.

Photographic plate I

Atelier wall at first light. Lyon, autumn.

Forthcoming

II.

Composing a brief.

The visitor sends a brief in three minutes. We sit with it for one business day. The proposal is a letter, not a product feed.

What that day looks like, exactly

  1. 01Read the brief. Twice. Then once more aloud.
  2. 02Pull six to eight candidate pieces from the curated pool.
  3. 03Narrow to three, sometimes two.
  4. 04Hand-write the proposal copy, paragraph per piece.
  5. 05Send a private link. No login. The proposal is for one set of eyes.

A proposal is a letter. We write it as one.

Photographic plate II

A working notebook, halfway through a brief.

Forthcoming

III.

Sending a piece.

The unboxing is part of the gift, not the post office. Every piece is hand-checked, hand-wrapped, hand-sealed. Nothing leaves us in plastic.

Packaging discipline

  1. 01Wrapped in unbleached tissue. Never plastic.
  2. 02Tied with a single linen ribbon, color matched to the piece.
  3. 03A short letter, hand-written, signed by the concierge.
  4. 04A wax seal on the outer envelope.
  5. 05Tracking sent to the sender, never the recipient.

The unboxing is part of the gift. We will never let it be the post office.

Photographic plate III

Wax sealing. Late afternoon, the desk by the window.

Forthcoming

IV.

Working with brands.

We onboard a small number of houses each year. Below is what we offer to those we represent, and what we owe to them in writing.

What a partner house receives

  1. 01A line in our private roster, by name only.
  2. 02A dedicated editorial pairing once per season.
  3. 03Inclusion in the holiday gift guide.
  4. 04A quarterly sell-through report, by SKU.
  5. 05A single point of contact, by name.
  6. 06The promises set out in our Standards, in writing.

A practice in writing

Two doors out.

For events and corporate giftingWrite to us about your programme.In writingRead our Standards.For visitorsStart a gift inquiry.