MAISON
CRAFT, MATERIAL & PROVENANCE
Maison Unet is directed by Alexa Chambeaux, who grew up between two ways of seeing a home. Her father was a French architect. Her mother, an Argentine interior designer. Between them, she learned early that a home is never just built. It is composed, with the same attention to proportion and material that goes into a piece of furniture, or a garment. That upbringing left her drawn less to places as destinations than to what the people within them had made, and how they had chosen to live.
She studied interior archecture in Paris, then completed a Master of Architecture at the University of Michigan. She carried into that work an earlier degree in biology. The two ahaped a conviction she still holds: materials should never work against the people who live among them.
This is the discipline the atelier was founded to practice. Maison Unet does not restore in the traditional sense, and it does not manufacture in the way a furniture house does. It looks for objects with fine structural bones, lost to time or to damage beyond repair, and gives them a second purpose of their own. Nothing is asked to pretend to be what it once was. Each piece is stripped to its essential form and rebuilt in material chosen as carefully as the form itself.
Where a piece is found whole and sound, ineeding no reinvention, it is left as it is. These objects are offered instead through Antiquités, the atelier's second practice, given to preservation rather than transformation.
TECHNICAL DIRECTION & INTEGRITY
Every material decision at Maison Unet passes through the same lens, guided by credentials as a LEED Green Associate and a WELL AP, and by a conviction that beauty and health are not separate pursuits but one and the same. The oils, waxes, timbers, and hides the atelier selects are chosen as much for what they leave out as what they bring in. Free of unnecessary toxins. True to their own nature, rather than disguised as something else.
An object entering a home should improve the air, the light, and the quality of the life lived around it. This is the standard behind every piece the atelier finishes, whether newly made or newly restored.
SOURCING & AUTHENTICATION
The objects that pass through Maison Unet are found rather than manufactured to order, gathered through estate sales, private collections, and travel across the United States, Europe, and South America.
Each piece is judged on its own evidence. Where a design can be attributed with confidence, to a known maker or a documented period, that attribution is stated plainly. Where it cannot be, none is claimed.
From there, a piece follows one of two paths. Those sound enough to be preserved are restored with restraint and offered through Antiquités, sold as themselves. Those beyond conventional repair, but strong enough in form to justify the effort, are given new life through the atelier's own work, and identified plainly as transformed.