Lelievre

Henri Lelievre founded the house in 1914, by acquiring the existing Maison Pique and Logerot at 36 rue des Petits Champs in the second arrondissement of Paris. It moved a few streets away to 13 rue du Mail in 1954 and has been there ever since.

It has spent a century collecting the trade it works in. In 1973 it bought the Lyon silk weaver Quenin, and its archive of fabrics with it, and in 1997 it acquired Tassinari and Chatel, whose hand-weaving workshop sits in the Croix Rousse, the old Canuts quarter of Lyon. The group's three fabric names carry founding dates of 1914, 1865 and 1680; Tassinari and Chatel traces its line back to the Pernon workshop, supplier to the greatest courts of Europe, and was among the first companies to receive the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label in 2006.

Lelievre is one of very few textile companies that still owns its own weaving mill, in the Loire near Lyon, with original looms in it. At the Lyon atelier, hand weavers make lampas brocades, chiselled velvets and silk brocades with gold and silver thread on jacquard hand looms, a process that proceeds at anything from a few centimetres to a few metres a day.

A cloth woven at a few centimetres a day is not a cloth you order lightly, and we would only put it on a frame we had rebuilt properly first.