The workshop: from an 1890 cowshed to a stone-cutting workshop

Our natural stone interior decor workshop is set in a farm in the Cambrésis built in 1890, in Ramillies, between Cambrai and Lille. Every wall light, every table lamp, every wall shelf and every side table we sell comes out of this building. There is no subcontracting, no factory, no second site: a single farm building, two partners, and French stone.

This page tells what the place was before, and what it has become. Our story tells the people who ran it.

Before

A cowshed, a barn, a courtyard

Before being a fine craft workshop, the building was a cowshed. Cows on one side, the henhouse next door, the milking parlour at the back. The courtyard received trailers of beets; the barn sheltered the farming equipment and the workbench where everything that could be repaired was repaired.

Nothing here had been designed for stone. A floor of beaten earth and tired concrete, red brick walls typical of the North, an exposed timber frame, electrics sized for two bulbs and a pump. On the other hand, everything had been designed for work: height under the roof frame, wide openings to bring in trailers, and a courtyard able to receive a delivery of several tonnes.

The barn and the courtyard before the 2026 works.

In 2024, the farm stopped operating for lack of a successor. The building remained standing, full, silent, with the feeding troughs in place and the tools hanging where they had always been.

The works: what we kept, what we changed

We restored the building ourselves, in autumn 2026, with a simple rule: we do not touch what tells a story, we keep nothing that gets in the way of work.

Kept: the brick walls, the timber frame, the feeding troughs, the cowshed door, Pierre's workbench and his farming tools. These are not decorative elements: they are the landmarks of the place.

The cowshed and its original feeding troughs; Pierre's workbench, kept as it was.

Changed: a smoothed concrete slab able to support blocks weighing several hundred kilos, an electrical panel sized for the machinery, neutral-temperature worktop lighting to judge the stone's shades, a water point for cutting and wet sanding, and extraction for limestone dust.

"We did not turn a cowshed into a workshop. We gave a working building work to do again."

After

A working stone-cutting workshop

The former cowshed is now a fully operational stone-cutting workshop. Yann, a stonecutter by trade, works the limestone by hand: marking out, cutting to size, roughing out, shaping, sanding, finishing. Manufacturing is French from start to finish — the stone is quarried in France, worked in France, and shipped from the North.

The cutting workshop set up in the former cowshed, Ramillies (59).

Nothing is moulded, nothing is reconstituted, nothing is imitated. Every piece is taken from a solid block: two wall lights from two different blocks will never have exactly the same veining or the same fossil shells. That is the difference between a one-of-a-kind natural stone piece and a mass-produced object in reconstituted stone.

How a natural stone light is made

Between the block that arrives in the courtyard and the box that leaves for your home, there are seven steps. None is automated.

Allow a few hours for a wall light and several days for a large floor lamp. When a block breaks while being cut, it does not go in the skip: it becomes a smaller piece again.

What an integrated workshop makes possible

Making things ourselves is not a romantic argument, it is a concrete advantage for an interior design or high-end furnishing project.

Custom work is possible. A wall light height, a wall shelf length, a drilling axis, a rougher or softer finish: we adapt because the hand that cuts is thirty metres from the desk that answers the email. Request a custom quote.

The range stays coherent. One stone and one style can dress an entire interior — a wall light in the entryway, a floor lamp in the living room, a wall shelf in the bathroom — without ever feeling like a catalogue.

Lead times and defects are under control. A chip found on unpacking is replaced by a piece recut here, not by an order at the other end of a logistics chain.

The result suits a minimalist or Japandi interior as well as the renovation of an old house: limestone warms polished concrete, tempers black metal and ages with wood.

Tomorrow: the showroom in the former milking parlour

The milking parlour, at the end of the building, will become in 2027 a natural stone decor showroom, open by appointment. First for interior architects and decorators, then for individuals who think of their interior as a whole rather than object by object.

Seeing the stone in person changes the decision: shades, grain and fossils cannot be fully rendered on a screen. Until the opening, we send stone samples on request.