The House
Maison Auvelle was founded in Geneva in 2014. The first office was a quiet set of rooms above a bookbinder on the Quai Gustave-Ador, taken on a long lease and arranged with the kind of restraint the house has, in the years since, become known for. The arrangement is broadly unchanged.
The Maison is a private house, in the older sense of the word — a practice that attends to the considered lives of a small number of individuals and families, over decades. Our work is conducted in private. The Maison is not, and has never been, a club. There is no clubhouse, no annual dinner, and no member directory.
Membership is not offered publicly. The Maison declines applications as a matter of practice, and has done since the first year. The house grows by introduction and at the discretion of its director.
The Practice
The Maison maintains four offices — Travel and Voyages, Acquisitions and Provenance, Residences and Estates, and Cultural and Social Access — each conducted by a partner who has spent the better part of a working life in the discipline. Members are introduced to a dedicated office at the outset of the relationship, and that office remains the principal point of contact thereafter.
The work is unhurried. The Maison does not respond, in the manner the larger industry has been pleased to perfect, with menus and proposals. We listen, then arrange. The arrangements are made with relationships maintained, in many cases, for thirty years. The cost of those relationships is the patience required to keep them, and we are content to bear it.
Discretion is not, in this house, a claim made on a website. It is the daily condition of the work. Members’ affairs are spoken of, within the house, only by those who must speak of them, and not at all outside it.
The People
The Maison is led by its founder, Élodie Marchand-Auvelle, with four partners who attend to the practice between them. The partners are, with few exceptions, the people the Maison’s members come to know. They live, variously, in Geneva, London, Paris, and Marrakech, and they travel as the work requires.