Élodie Marchand-Auvelle founded the Maison in Geneva in 2014. She is French-Swiss, the daughter of a Geneva private banker and a Provençal mother, and was educated at the Institut Le Rosey and at Sciences Po. She came to her present work by way of fourteen years in private banking and a further period in the discreet trade conducted on and around the Place Vendôme, an apprenticeship she has since described as the only training that prepared her for the founding of the house.
She speaks French, Italian, English, and a sufficient German for the work the Maison conducts in Zurich. She divides her time between Lake Geneva and a small estate in the Vaucluse, the latter inherited from her mother and kept in a manner that has not greatly changed since her grandfather's day.
She reads, by preference, French novels of the early twentieth century, and writes — when the work permits — for the Maison's own Journal. She is a member of two foundations whose names she does not list in print.