Workshop Stories

A client wanted to strip her grandmother's walnut dresser to lighten the wood, like on Pinterest. We told her no. Stripped wood is trendy and we love it, but there...

Some "antique" furniture is younger than your washing machine. In our workshop, we don't need certificates to know this; we just turn over a drawer. These are the 7 signs...

Blue is the favorite color of more people in the world than any other. For centuries, it was the most expensive pigment available, reserved for the Virgin Mary's mantle. Today,...

Our most veteran restorer has been working with wood for forty-eight years. He started at fourteen. I asked him if he knew any young people learning the trade. He laughed,...

A client wrote to me looking for a vintage piece of furniture. I asked him what he had in mind and he sent me a photo of a 19th-century walnut...

In 2011, 1,600 students took days to assemble the world's largest jigsaw puzzle: 551,232 pieces, with the image facing them. An 18th-century cabinetmaker did something more difficult: thousands of hand-cut...

There was a time when it seemed that to have an elegant home, you had to live with very little. Fortunately, extreme minimalism is dead. In 2026, true luxury is...

In 1434, Jan van Eyck painted a five-centimeter mirror in which he reflected an entire room. Six hundred years later, it is still the most striking thing about the painting....

Homes change because we change. We go from looking for practical furniture to furniture that can withstand bumps, until one day the house falls silent. That's when priorities change. You...

Three thousand years ago, the Egyptians solved the problem with a linen rectangle tied with strings. Today, we have cotton, lace, silk, and lycra for every day of the week....

A restorer in our workshop. Hands stained with wax. The cell phone ringing in their pocket, unanswered. This story begins with an everyday scene from the workshop to talk about...

Sustainability. The word is in every catalog, on every label, in every ad. But there's something no one says: the most sustainable thing you can do with a piece of...