The Family Farm

1890

In 1890, the Deleau family built a farm in Ramillies, in northern France. They did not buy it, they did not take it over: they built it.

The date is still engraved in the old barn. It is the only trace that remains: no deed has come down to us. Four digits, and the barn around them.

Five generations

Five generations worked the land here. Wheat, corn, potatoes, beets. Cows in the cowshed, hens next door.

The farm came through two wars without falling. Each time, someone took over.

In the fourth generation, Georges Edmond and Marie-Thérèse Deleau. In the fifth, their two sons: Georges and Pierre. The first is Agathe's father. The second would be the last to run the farm.

Agathe spent her childhood in this courtyard, at her grandparents' and then at her uncle's. Running after the cows, milking them, watching calves being born, collecting eggs: she spent all her free time here.

Pierre

Pierre Deleau was the last one.

Born in Cambrai, a farmer since childhood. A man of the earth, in the most literal sense. Outside his farm, he loved two things: cycling and his garden.

And he tinkered. The whole farm bears the trace of it — buildings adapted over the years to repair, weld and reassemble farming tools. Here, we did not replace what we could remake.

In the family, when Pierre is mentioned, it is his voice that comes back first. Deep, gravelly, a little rough. It is the detail everyone cites before any other.

In 2024, he retired. No one in the family was in a position to take over the farm. For the first time since 1890, the farm came to a stop.

La Maison Pierre

La Maison Pierre. Not "Pierre's house": La Maison Pierre.

Maison (house), for three reasons at once. The farm — the one you live in, the one you come back to. The family home. And the house in the sense understood by the craft trades: a workshop, a signature, a standard.

Pierre, for two. The material that Yann works. And the man who ran this farm until the end.

There is a third name, which does not appear on the sign but is there all the same: Georges, Pierre's brother, Agathe's father. This house is as much his.

The double meaning was intended from day one. When we announced it to the Deleau family, it moved them.

The farm now belongs to Agathe and her sister Charlotte, Pierre's two nieces. Our workshop is a tenant. It remains what it has always been: a Deleau farm. Simply, nothing is grown here anymore — stone is cut.

What the farm has become

The former cowshed has become a stone-cutting workshop. The feeding troughs stayed, and so did Pierre's workbench. In 2027, the former milking parlour will house a showroom, by appointment.

Those who switched the lights back on are two childhood friends: Yann, a stonecutter, and Rémi, Agathe's husband.

The first pallets of stone have arrived. They are stored there, facing the farm's historic tractor.