Our Story

There has always been a particular kind of shopping I love — the slow kind. The kind that happens in a quiet shop on a side street in Paris, or at a Saturday morning fair in the English countryside, or in the back room of a dealer in Pimlico who has been doing this for forty years and knows exactly which tray is the one. The kind where the person selling you the piece has held it, looked it over, and can tell you something about where it has been.

That kind of shopping is harder to find now. Not impossible — but harder. And so The Finer Things Maison began as a quiet attempt to keep it alive.

I come from a family of collectors. My eye was trained early — at home, at the table, beside parents and grandparents who could tell the story of a piece of vintage Baccarat or the maker of a hand-painted porcelain plate without thinking twice. Collecting was not a hobby in our house. It was a way of paying attention to the world.

I have been collecting myself for many years now, and the most beautiful thing I have learned is this: you never finish learning. Every piece teaches you something. Every antique dealer — even the great ones, even the ones who have spent fifty years doing this — will tell you the same. There is always a hallmark you have not seen before, a maker you have not heard of, a small detail that turns a piece into something rarer than you thought. The knowledge is constant, on both sides — for the one who carries the object, and for the one who receives it. That is the great pleasure of it.

My taste was not built in a single place. I grew up between Lake Como and the Middle East. I have lived in Milan, London, Miami, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, New York, Washington, and Boston. Each city taught me something different — Milan taught me proportion, London taught me restraint, Paris taught me the love of a single beautiful object, the Middle East taught me what real hospitality looks like at a table. The Maison is, in a sense, the quiet sum of all that looking.

I have spent a lifetime mixing the new with the old — an antique château plate beside a modern linen napkin, an Art Deco compact tucked into a contemporary clutch, a first-edition Wharton stacked beside the fashion magazines of this season. The pleasure has always been in the layering.

A great shop is only as good as the people behind it, and I am fortunate to work with extraordinary dealers across London and Paris — men and women who have spent decades doing this, who know their pieces intimately, and who have become, over the years, real friends. When I’m in London, we don’t only do business. We break bread. We sit for long lunches in Marylebone and longer ones in the Marais. The pieces I bring home are chosen in those conversations — over coffee, over wine, over the slow turning-over of objects that have already lived several lives.

That is what the Maison is built on. Not a wholesale catalogue. A network of trusted hands, a lifetime of looking, and a great deal of affection for the small things that make a home feel like one.

The antique pieces are gathered quietly, in person, across London, Paris, and the great European fairs. Sometimes one piece comes home from a trip. Sometimes thirty. The contemporary pieces are sourced from makers whose craft we admire — small ateliers, family workshops, artists working in materials worth the time they take.

Nothing here is mass. Nothing here is hurried. And nothing here is in the shop unless we genuinely love it.

We hope the Maison becomes a small destination for the kind of person who notices things — the weight of a piece of silver, the cut of vintage crystal, the way a beautiful book changes a side table. We hope you find pieces here that you live with, gift, set the table with, hand down. We hope you write to us, ask questions, send us photographs of your tables. We hope you become part of it.

Welcome to the Maison.