Our Story — Maison Espoir

My name is Nadia. Fatima is my grandmother.

She came to Paris from Algeria in the early 1970s with little more than her mother's tools and a belief that beautiful things should be passed between hands, not locked in glass cases. She found a small space in the 3rd arrondissement and opened what she called simply the workshop. Over thirty years, it grew into a quiet institution. Regular customers brought their daughters. Their daughters brought their daughters. Every ring, every pendant, every bracelet that left that room had passed through her hands at least twice.

The night of the riots

We do not want to make this political. What happened, happened. The neighbourhood burned. By morning, the boutique's front was gone — the oak door she had installed in 1998, the hand-lettered sign, the display cases she had commissioned from a carpenter in Belleville. Everything that could be broken was broken.

Fatima was not hurt. The pieces were in the back room, in the drawers she had built into the walls the year before. They survived.

A closing, not a surrender

She is 81. She told us she had already been thinking about closing for a year before it happened. The riots made the decision for her. She will not rebuild. She is tired, she said, in the good way — the way you are tired after you have done something completely.

What remains in the atelier is now being offered here, at closing prices. Every piece was handcrafted or personally sourced by Fatima over her thirty years. None of it has been manufactured for this sale. When a piece sells, it is gone.

A hot meal with every order

This was Fatima's idea, not ours. She said she did not need the money from this sale to live — she has the family, she has the apartment, she has enough. She asked that every sale contribute a hot meal through the Croix-Rouge Française to people in the neighbourhood who were displaced by the same events that took her shop. We agreed immediately.

There is no restock. There is no next season. If you buy something from this sale, you are the reason a person ate today, and you are carrying something that passed through a woman's hands for thirty years in Paris.

We think that is enough reason.