The Maison maintains a working arrangement with a flat in Mount Street, taken when the work brings us to London, and from which this letter has been written — slowly, and against a greyer light than is usual at this latitude.
The London our members visit, and the London the rest of the world reads about, are no longer the same city. 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 they have always used. The city around them has not been so determined.
These observations are made 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 in the present, and any institution that prefers the past to its members would not deserve the trust they extend to it.
What is worth keeping in the older Mayfair is not the surfaces — the brass plates on the doors of the clubs, the tailoring rooms whose windows still bear older names. The surfaces are pleasant to walk past, but they are, increasingly, the subject of theatre. The rooms behind them are, in many cases, occupied by businesses that have nothing to do with what the plate says.
What is worth keeping is the practice. The practice is conducted, in the rooms that still hold to it, as it was conducted decades ago, and by 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 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 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. These houses are kept, principally, by being used in the way they were intended to be used.
— Winter 2025