I have been in London since the second week of January, by way of a longer-than-intended visit to a member in the country and an obligation, very pleasantly accepted, to spend a morning at a small museum off Manchester Square. The Maison maintains a working arrangement with a flat in Mount Street, which I take when the work brings me to the city, and from which I have been writing this letter — slowly, and against a greyer light than I am accustomed to in the Vaucluse.
The London the Maison's members visit, and the London the rest of the world reads about, are no longer the same city. This has been true, in some sense, for a long time. It is, at present, more obviously true than I can remember it having been. The institutions to which our members belong — the older clubs, the smaller foundations, two or three of the auction houses — have continued, with a determination that is itself touching, to conduct their affairs on the timetable and within the conventions they have always conducted them on. The city around them has not been so determined. Whole streets I knew well in the late 1990s, when I lived briefly in Belgravia, have been refitted into something I do not, on present evidence, recognise.
I make these observations without sentimentality. The Maison is not, and is not intended to be, an instrument of nostalgia. Our work is conducted on behalf of members who live, by definition, in the present, and any institution that prefers the past to its members would not deserve the trust the members extend to it. I have therefore been spending some time, during this visit, considering what it is, in the older Mayfair, that is worth the work of keeping.
The conclusion I have arrived at, after some weeks of walking and rather more reading than is my usual pace, is that what is worth keeping is not the surfaces. The surfaces — the brass plates on the doors of the clubs, the tailoring rooms whose windows still bear the names of houses that supplied a great-grandfather's wardrobe, the older patterns of the mews — are pleasant to walk past, but they are, in the present circumstances, increasingly the subject of a sort of theatre. Visitors photograph them. Younger residents repaint them. The rooms behind them are, in many cases, occupied by businesses that have nothing to do with what the brass plate says.
What is worth keeping is the practice. The practice is, in the rooms that still hold to it, conducted as it was conducted thirty and fifty and a hundred years ago, and the people who conduct it are, in nearly every case, people who have spent their working lives within a single house, on a single street, attending to a particular kind of customer in a particular kind of way. They are uninterested in growth. They are uninterested, indeed, in being known. They are interested in the work, and in the relationships through which the work has, over decades, come to them. They are the institutions, in any meaningful sense. The brass plates are the smallest part of it.
The Maison's working arrangement with the older Mayfair is conducted with this in mind. We do not introduce members to the surfaces. The surfaces will be encountered, in any case, and require no introduction. We introduce members to the practice — to the cutter who will not, even now, accept a commission until he has spent three meetings with the principal; to the dealer in older furniture whose stock is housed in a single small room above a shop that does not advertise; to the librarian at one of the foundations who can, given six weeks, locate the printed sermon a member's grandfather is said to have heard delivered in 1934. These are the institutions worth keeping. They are kept, principally, by being used in the way they were intended to be used, and by being preserved from the press of business that the surfaces, increasingly, attract.
I have sometimes been asked — by members and, more often, by friends outside the Maison — whether the practice I have described is sustainable. The honest answer is that it has, on a number of occasions in the years I have been involved in this kind of work, appeared not to be sustainable, and has nonetheless been sustained. The houses worth keeping have, time and again, been kept by a small number of people who decided, against the encouragement of their advisors, to keep them. The institutions that have not been kept are, in most cases, the ones whose principals concluded that the keeping was not commercially advisable. The judgment of the market, on this question, has not been borne out.
I write this letter from a country whose conduct in such matters is, at present, an instructive example. The houses that have survived in London have, by and large, survived because their principals were willing to forgo the growth their advisors recommended. The Maison's working assumption, in introducing members to these houses, is that they will continue to be worth the introduction for as long as their principals continue to make this decision. I have no reason to doubt that they will. The decision is, in the end, a private one, and the houses we work with are, by their nature, the kind that prefer their decisions to be made in private.
The morning at the museum, which is the closer occasion of this letter, was spent in the contemplation of a small painting that has not, in my view, received the attention it merits, and on which the Maison may yet have something to say in print. I will not name the painting, or the museum, or the painter. What I will say is that the conditions under which the painting has been kept — quietly, in a single room, with a curator who is willing to spend an hour with a visitor who has asked to spend it with her — are themselves a model of what is worth keeping, and a corrective to the temptation, which afflicts even the best institutions in the present moment, to be louder than is dignified.
I will return to Geneva at the end of next week. The flat in Mount Street will be made available to two members in February, and to a third in March. I expect to be back in London myself in May, when the morning at the museum will, if all goes well, become an afternoon. I do not, in the meantime, require that the city be other than it is. I am, however, more grateful than usual for those quarters of it that have decided, for whatever reasons, to remain themselves.
— Élodie Marchand-Auvelle, January 2026