A conversation with
Léa and Thomas, Maison Acacia
For this new feature, By Charlot takes you to the seaside, to discover Maison Acacia, a guesthouse that smells of holidays. Vintage surfboards hanging on the wall, plants flourishing almost everywhere, a shady patio reserved for guests... The scene is set, we're at Léa and Thomas's.
Hello Léa, hello Thomas, tell us a little about yourselves and your journey...
Léa: Hello, we're Léa and Tom, two creative souls. We both have backgrounds in art, I'm a photographer myself and Tom is a decorator. Over the years, we've created projects together that showcase beautiful living spaces. We started by opening a small café in the Saint-Ouen flea market, immersed in the world of antiques and bric-a-brac. We then moved to the South and set up a guesthouse called La Pinède, our very first venture into hospitality. Finally, we opened this place, Maison Acacia, a guesthouse with a hybrid spirit of its own. It's a place to live and to welcome others, blending hospitality, dining and a boutique, allowing us to host our guests in the very best conditions.
Thomas, your DIY skills are impressive. What gave you a taste for working with your hands?
Thomas: I've loved this since I was tiny, it's something my father passed on to me. He's got this quirk of never throwing anything away, which means we end up storing an awful lot, but it's a real joy for me to dig out things I've had stashed for 10 or 15 years. It's less fun for Léa, but I do love recycling or repurposing things, it's hugely satisfying and it costs less too. And now I'm getting a taste for teaching others how to do it, through tutorials and videos.
On that note, at Maison Acacia you work with reclaimed objects and fairly basic materials, then transform them in spectacular fashion. It's exhilarating to realise that so little can achieve so much, where do you find all these ideas?
Thomas: A lot of our inspiration comes from our travels, from things we see that aren't exactly affordable, so we try to recreate them with our own means. When you look at the décor that makes up our world, we have very few designer or signed pieces, they're mostly things from high street shops that we mix with other elements. The coffee table in our living room, for instance, is made of logs topped with tajine trivets. The same table would cost a fortune in a fancy boutique. So we really like to cook up our own recipe and dress it just right with the pieces we want in our home.
Léa: We've developed that together, in our everyday life and during our travels. That knack for spotting and hunting down objects we come across on our travels, the kind that would seem impossible to recreate. But we don't see limits in that respect. We both know that nothing is impossible. With reclaimed materials, old objects, vintage pieces, you can bring things back to life and give them a fresh, contemporary feel. Being able to make them functional and usable day to day is something we've always done together and love to share. It's what makes us such a good team, in life as much as in work.
« A great deal of our inspiration comes from our travels, from things we see that are out of reach, so we try to recreate them with our own means. »
Do you follow DIY accounts and tutorials, or does inspiration simply come naturally to you?
Thomas: It depends, sometimes we see things that have already been made and think they're very cool but could be approached differently. There are also ideas that are purely inspirational, that come to us after a walk through the calanques or elsewhere. It's all very varied. But I must admit that Pinterest is also an incredible platform for picking up ideas from all sorts of different countries.
Léa: We love natural materials that are easy to work with, like wood or other workable materials. Tom can cut, saw, plane, you name it. We don't really have any limits because his DIY skills mean he can make almost anything. So it's lovely to have the ideas without the frustration of not being able to make things ourselves.
Thomas: It's become a bit of a challenge for us, actually. Take the outdoor table, for instance: we wanted it big, beautiful and wide, and the trouble is that buying one like that in the shops costs a fortune, so we decided to make it ourselves.
Léa: We started from an idea we'd spotted in a hotel in the desert. We bring back a lot of inspiration from abroad. It's not that France doesn't inspire us, but we've been lucky enough to travel to countries where DIY isn't a trend but a way of life. In some countries in the southern hemisphere, for example, everything is made by hand and with real boldness, which has influenced us a great deal now that we've seen just how beautiful things can be made from so little.
You're very active on Instagram, how do you manage your social media?
Léa: On Instagram, you show what you want to show, it isn’t always a reflection of reality, that’s rather the point, actually. But it’s still part of our daily life, sometimes I show the project’s flaws, the difficult moments. I try to be fairly transparent, but that’s not really the goal either. I’m not there to pour my heart out to our followers, my aim is to make people want things, to inspire, to bring a bit of sunshine, especially this year, but without being utopian about it.
Thomas: That side of things is Léa’s department. The editorial work, the storytelling, and so on. Through our content, we try to inspire people, to take them on a journey, let them escape, and give them visual pleasure at a time when we all need it.
What's more, well before the pandemic began, you'd already decided to leave the capital in favour of a better quality of life. What prompted your departure at the time, and what did you find in the south that you'd been missing in Paris?
Thomas: It all started quite naturally when our first daughter, Java, was born. We soon realised that having outdoor space is a real plus when raising a child. In the Paris region, it simply wasn't within our budget. My parents have a house in the south, so we wanted to be closer to them.
Léa: We knew we wanted to build on the success of our little café in Saint-Ouen by finding somewhere bigger, somewhere we could welcome more people, and we found a house in Marseille that offered exactly that. This idea of living in the South, which could have taken 2 to 3 years, ended up taking just 6 months because we found La Pinède. And with Maison Acacia, our ambition was to have our own little hotel before turning 40. We set ourselves goals, and the South offers those possibilities, not just because property prices are more reasonable, but also because there’s so much to do here. It’s incredibly inspiring. We live in a city people go on holiday to, so we’re already in a setting made for it. I’m of Mediterranean origin, it’s rooted in me, though I didn’t realise it until I actually lived by the sea. In the end, living here is a privilege we appreciate every single day.
At La Pinède you'd developed an original concept: every object in the house was for sale. You've recreated that here, could you tell us more about it?
Thomas: This idea came to us during a trip to Argentina, near Salta. We were staying in a Boutique Hotel, where the concept was, as the name suggests, that you could buy any piece of furniture you liked. We wanted to bring home a bit of a bed upholstered in Aztec fabric, but it wasn't for sale, which we thought was a shame. That's where it all started: we tried out the concept in our café in Saint-Ouen and decided to keep this guiding principle for the other places we've created since.
Léa: It started from a personal urge. Rather than pinching the things we loved from hotels during our trips abroad, we thought it would be rather nice if guests staying with us could actually take home that decorative piece they'd fallen for. It's also a way for us, incorrigible lovers of change that we are, to keep renewing the place: if an iconic piece from one of the rooms gets bought, we'll have to replace it, which stops the décor from ever feeling fixed. It's a way of reinventing ourselves, of bringing something new for our loyal guests, fresh content, and it's a synergy that's really lovely to live with.
Thomas: We've got containers in Paris and Marseille, full of things we've brought back from our travels, or that we once had at home but don't fancy any more, and that we'll be delighted to rediscover in 5 years' time. We also hunt around a lot at Emmaüs.
Léa: There's the stock, and then there are the pieces we don't want to part with because we're too attached to them, because they hold sentimental value. But beyond that, we're not particularly attached to material things, so we don't hesitate to replace or change them. That's just how we work, and thanks to our containers, we've got our own little flea market.
« We've always had a soft spot for the art of entertaining: that extra little touch, the finishing decorative detail that makes all the difference. »
Has decor always been part of your DNA?
Léa: I did, because my mother is an interior decorator. She passed on to me her sense of beauty and of gracious living, especially through the art of the table. I was raised with these values, and my father embraced them too. Nothing was ever left to chance in the houses where I grew up.
Thomas: For my part, I was always very attuned to the art of hosting, with that little extra touch, the small decorative detail that makes all the difference. The aim being to delight, to astonish, to surprise, and to leave behind happy memories.
Léa: These shared values of kindness and generosity, we put them to work today in our projects, as though we were welcoming friends into our own home. We've always loved that, and now it's become our profession. We try to bring a real sense of family warmth to the places we create.
Thomas: And the best compliment we could ever receive is when a customer tells us, "I felt right at home." That's incredibly rewarding.
Among the By Charlot plants, which is your favourite, the one that best captures the spirit of the Maison Acacia?
Léa: I'm very much inspired by South America, so I naturally gravitated towards the cacti and succulents, which feature heavily in the By Charlot range. We were also drawn to the words written on the pots, because clearly L'Audacieuse or L'Aventurière speak to our project. Building this venture with two children and no one to help us was quite an adventure. We needed plenty of audacity to pull off such a bold project. And Le Charmeur speaks to us too, because we want to charm our customers through our social media and our way of life, in an authentic way. Charm is also part of our relationship as a couple, it's a word I'm very fond of.
Thomas: As for me, it was the pots that won me over. Léa's the one who looks after the plants at home and has a real eye for the succulents we love having around, but for my part, it was the pot itself that caught my interest. I love the work that's gone into the pots, and the fact that they're reusable means they can be given a new look in all sorts of different ways.
« I love the work that's gone into the pots, the fact that they're reusable means you can reinvent them in a thousand different ways. »
« Le Charmeur speaks to us, for we wish to charm our customers through our social media and our way of life, authentically. »
We touched on this earlier, you give a lot of advice to your community, particularly on decoration and DIY. Is this a way for you to build a connection with your customers?
Léa: Yes, because it's the first contact we have with our potential customers. It's obviously a way of connecting with all the people who share our values. It's a way of expressing ourselves, by creating content and sharing it. It's a daily job, I spend a lot of time on it.
Thomas: It's also a way of exchanging with our followers, who share their own creations with us too, which is great fun. We make a point of replying to everyone, which takes up a lot of our time, but these exchanges are hugely interesting.
Léa: It gives our customers the pleasant feeling of knowing us a little, of knowing our daughters, and so of a less formal approach. The girls are part of our life, of our projects, we can't just leave them out of Instagram. It's a part of my job that I love developing, I've grown rather fond of it and it's opened doors for us, like this conversation with you today. We get to meet people we'd never otherwise have crossed paths with, so at a time when everyone's quick to blame social media, for us it's actually a huge advantage.
Can you describe a typical day at Maison Acacia?
Thomas: Honestly, we don't really have a typical day! Well, not really...
Léa: Our only ritual is looking after the girls in the morning, which is why we don't serve breakfast here, we want to devote ourselves entirely to them. From 9am we handle the room logistics. Then the two of us meet up for lunch. After that, I take care of communications while Tom focuses more on the structural and administrative side of things. Once we're done, we sometimes take some time for ourselves, we go to the beach, or head off for a stroll along the harbour or through the calanques before picking the girls up. Otherwise, there are much more scattered days, when we go to Marseille, for instance, for meetings with suppliers. At the moment we're sourcing a lot, because we want to create a little concept store on the ground floor of the house. It's really exciting because we meet so many craftspeople, we have things made specially, it's a part I absolutely love.
Thomas: We source all our craftspeople locally. It's a chance for us to talk, to meet people, to share ideas. And we're lucky that between two meetings we can nip off for a little ice cream on the beach, which is rather lovely. Since our weeks and weekends are completely unstructured, we don't feel the least bit guilty! We really make the most of our life here.
Finally, could you give us three small or big joys of your life in La Ciotat?
Léa: For me personally, my great joy here is living in a pedestrian town centre. Not just because I don't have a driving licence, but mostly because I can open our front door without worrying about our daughters' safety. There's so much less stress, and it's wonderfully soothing to live near the Mediterranean. Having a sense of neighbourhood life, bumping into shopkeepers, doing everything on foot. Living on a human scale makes me feel so much more at peace.
Thomas: My great joy is keeping eye contact with the sea every single day. And living on a harbour is special, because it's a place of comings and goings, of reunions, it's a different state of mind...
Léa: It's true that we're both quite nostalgic for the past, in our décor and in our outlook on life. Harbours have always had a melancholic, nostalgic side to them. A pedestrian harbour like La Ciotat's is an absolute joy to live by.
Thomas: Another great joy: swapping a jog around Île Saint-Denis for a jog through the Calanques! There's simply no comparison. And being able to cycle everywhere... It's a town that offers a wonderful quality of life. Not to mention its utterly unique light... It's no accident that the Lumière brothers invented cinema in La Ciotat. For Léa, who's a photographer, it's magical, with the sea casting its silvery reflections across the town...
