Some Businesses Begin with a Plan.

Max and I met in New York in the eary 2000's, when we were both working in finance. He was French, raised between cultures — his mother is American, but she made her life in Paris, where she raised her family and owned an art gallery on the Place des Vosges. Most of Max’s family is still in France.

My connection to antiques came from a different direction, but it began just as early. My uncle, my aunt and my brother were antique dealers, and old things were simply part of the landscape of my life. I grew up understanding that an object could be beautiful not despite its age, but because of it — because of the hands that had made it, the rooms it had occupied, the marks it had accumulated and the people who had lived with it before us. That instinct followed me everywhere. I read historical fiction. I travel to places because I want to understand what happened there. I can lose hours in an old house, a church, a market or a museum imagining the lives that passed through it. I have always been more interested in something with a history than something that has just arrived from a factory. Max is much the same. He is a lifelong history obsessive, and over the course of a friendship that has lasted three decades, that shared interest was always somewhere in the background. Years after we first met in New York, we reconnected more closely and began talking about what we were seeing in Europe — old furniture, architectural fragments, paintings, garden pieces and objects that had somehow survived for generations. The conversation gradually changed from look at this to what if we actually did something with this? And then Charlotte, Max’s sister in France, became part of it. Suddenly we had something unusual: an American point of view, a French family rooted in Paris, people on both sides of the Atlantic, and three sets of eyes looking for things that felt special rather than merely expensive or fashionable. That became The Shop. We source primarily in France and across Europe, looking for antiques, art, architectural elements and objects with presence — pieces that carry their history visibly but still feel completely at home in contemporary interiors. We aren’t interested in filling a room with antiques simply because they are old. We are interested in the one object that changes the room: an early table with an extraordinary surface, a fragment of carved stone, an eccentric painting, a worn garden urn, a small box someone cared enough to keep for two hundred years. Our collection is deliberately eclectic because history is eclectic. What connects it is our eye. Beautiful things. Old things. Things with stories. Things worth carrying forward.