Christiane Lemieux

Christiane Lemieux Founder and Creative Director Lemieux Et Cie, Author of The Finer Things, Undecorate and Frictionles

Yellow walls, a courtyard, the smell of rain on stone. That was Barragán's Guadalajara before we ever set foot in it, an...
09/25/2026

Yellow walls, a courtyard, the smell of rain on stone. That was Barragán's Guadalajara before we ever set foot in it, and then we did.

We went to Mexico to source, not to sightsee, but you can't really separate the two. Our team spent the week meeting artisans, walking factories, running our hands over volcanic stone and native woods we don't have names for yet in English.

And then there was Barragán himself. His house sits in that impossible yellow, walls that turn a hallway into an event, a staircase that exists purely to make you feel something before you reach the top. He believed a home should produce emotion, not just shelter it. You feel that the second you walk in.

We saw the cathedrals too. Centuries of stone carved by hands that never signed their names, patience as a building material.

Between the two, something clicked. The volcanic stone stools we found, the hand turned wood, the carved doors we couldn't stop photographing, all of it comes from the same instinct. Someone decided a material deserved more time than it was given.

We didn't go looking for inspiration. We went looking for partners and materials. Inspiration just kept showing up anyway.

Giclée is French for "to spray." Somehow that's the least romantic name possible for one of the most exacting processes ...
09/23/2026

Giclée is French for "to spray." Somehow that's the least romantic name possible for one of the most exacting processes in printmaking.

The technique goes back to 1988, when a printmaker in Los Angeles named Jack Duganne needed a word for what he'd just done with an IRIS printer built for prepress proofing, not art. He'd coaxed it into producing fine art prints with a tonal range no other process could touch. Within a few years, David Hockney and Chuck Close were using the same machines. What started as a workaround became a medium.

We haven't strayed far from that instinct. Every piece starts as an extremely high resolution file, then fine pigment ink gets laid down in droplets so small you'd need a microscope to see them.

The paper matters just as much as the ink. We use Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavy sheet with a surface originally developed centuries ago for copperplate etching, the same tradition Rembrandt printed on. That's why it has that texture, that felt like grain under your hand. It reads more like a painting than a print.

No acid. No wood pulp. That's not marketing language, that's what keeps a print looking the way it looked on day one, decades from now.

Every sheet is inspected by hand. Hand torn, stamped, numbered, signed. Nothing in that sentence happens by machine.

Giclée has become shorthand for "fine art print." The word is new. The instinct behind it, matching craft to permanence, is centuries old.

Coming soon to 161 Grand Street. Lemieux et Cie and Métaphores, the French textile editor, come together around a shared...
09/21/2026

Coming soon to 161 Grand Street. Lemieux et Cie and Métaphores, the French textile editor, come together around a shared exploration of neuroaesthetics, and the way material, texture and light shape our experience of a space. Two complementary approaches meet, one rooted in furniture and design, the other in textile and material.

Sleep is the first thing we sacrifice every fall, and it's the thing we can least afford to lose.There's a moment every ...
09/20/2026

Sleep is the first thing we sacrifice every fall, and it's the thing we can least afford to lose.

There's a moment every year, right around now, when summer's permission runs out. School starts again. The inbox wakes up before you do. The sun clocks out a little earlier every evening, and somehow we're expected to keep the same pace anyway.

This is the transition nobody prepares for. The handoff from long days to short ones, from loose schedules to tight ones, and the body feels it before the brain admits it. Sleep is where that toll gets paid first.

Neuroaesthetics has a name for what a well designed room does in moments like this. It regulates you. Light, color, texture, the weight of a blanket, all of it is information your nervous system is reading whether you're paying attention or not.

Nowhere does that matter more than the bedroom. Sleep isn't a reward you earn after a long day. It's the maintenance your entire system runs on, and it's the first thing that needs protecting when the season shifts under you.

I think the most radical thing you can do right now is make the room take that job seriously. Dark enough, cool enough, still enough that your body has no argument left for staying awake.

Trends will tell you to keep up.
Your home should just help you rest.

I keep thinking about the moment before the glaze sets. That stretch inside the kiln where the outcome is still undecide...
09/18/2026

I keep thinking about the moment before the glaze sets. That stretch inside the kiln where the outcome is still undecided.

The pieces you see stacked and drying, waiting their turn near a wood-fed fire, are shaped by hand before they ever meet flame. Someone feeds the kiln by hand too, wood after wood, hour after hour, watching heat climb past a thousand degrees until the clay stops being clay and becomes something closer to stone.

Patina isn't applied. It happens to a piece. Oxidation in the kiln pulls minerals to the surface unevenly, so no two stools ever finish the same way. Green shifts into oxblood. Bronze pools into shadow. A crack of smoke against the wall of the kiln becomes, eventually, the exact variation you'll run your hand over on a side table.

This is the process behind our Taiko, Hashira, and Enso stools. Each one hand fired, hand glazed, finished in a wood burning kiln by artisans who have spent years learning to read fire the way a sommelier reads a vintage. The bubbling in the glaze, the depth of tone, none of it can be replicated by a machine. It can only be earned.

I used to think tapestries were static things. Fixed, permanent, hung once and left for a lifetime.I was wrong.European ...
09/16/2026

I used to think tapestries were static things. Fixed, permanent, hung once and left for a lifetime.

I was wrong.

European households treated their walls like their closets: seasonally. Heavy verdure tapestries, woven with dense forests and rivers, came down each spring for lighter florals and greenery. It wasn't decoration. It was ritual, a way of marking time before calendars did it for us.

Verdure means green, but the word came to describe an entire genre: woodland scenes, dense foliage, a forest that never resolves into a single tree. The French perfected it. For centuries it was the background to aristocratic life.

We've reimagined that history with our Verdure Limited Edition Art Print. Same density of leaf and shadow, printed on German etching paper with a full bleed deckled edge, in an edition of 100. Signed. Numbered. Meant to stay exactly where you hang it, because a forest like this one was never really about winter or summer to begin with.

Available now at lemieuxetcie.com and in the SoHo showroom at 161 Grand Street.

Slide 3: "Large Leaf Verdure with Birds" (1525) courtesy of
Slide 4: “Fantastic Landscape” (ca. 1725), probably woven by Jacques Dorliac, courtesy of

Every room is missing something.That's what Design Services is for. A conversation, about proportion, restraint, what a ...
09/14/2026

Every room is missing something.

That's what Design Services is for. A conversation, about proportion, restraint, what a space is actually trying to say. Sometimes the fix is one piece. Sometimes it's the whole room, rethought from scale up.

Request a consultation.

09/13/2026

Which design profile are you? Take the quiz.

Tell us how you want your space to feel.

An oversized mirror knows how to disappear, but only if the furniture around it knows its place.Set a console or bench l...
09/11/2026

An oversized mirror knows how to disappear, but only if the furniture around it knows its place.

Set a console or bench low and off to one side, never centered dead-on, and the mirror gets room to breathe above it. Let a chair sit slightly turned rather than facing it head-on, so the reflection catches the room instead of a person sitting still. Keep everything nearby lower in scale than the mirror itself, the frame should be the tallest thing in the vignette, not competing with a piece of furniture for the eye's attention.

The best placement is the kind you don't notice, until you try to picture the room without it.

The art of the mix.A new burl coffee table beside a vintage Pierre Jeanneret chair. A gallery wall of centuries-old land...
09/09/2026

The art of the mix.

A new burl coffee table beside a vintage Pierre Jeanneret chair. A gallery wall of centuries-old landscapes next to a piece made last year. Nothing here matches on purpose, and that's exactly the point.

Contrast is what makes a room feel collected instead of decorated. The old pieces carry history the new ones haven't earned yet. The new pieces keep the old ones from feeling like a museum. Put them in the same room and they start a conversation neither could have alone.

We build every space this way.

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161 Grand Street
New York, NY
10013

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