Meet the Founders

The Story

  • In early 2025, Annie sent this baker in Paris an email with an idea — a product called the Bag Ètte. A canvas bag designed for the Parisian lifestyle: a uniquely shaped bag to carry bread, flowers, wine. Simple, functional, lived-in.

    At the time, there was only one. Made in her kitchen.

    She cut the fabric and pattern with a friend, then went to a local seamstress in LA and asked if she could help bring it to life. She said, I think so.

    Christophe wrote back: I love it! bring it to Paris.

    So she did. She brought ten — They sold out in a week.

    A month later, she returned with 150.

    After that, Christophe said, if you ever have another idea, don’t hesitate to share it.

  • With his understanding of hospitality and his discipline around craft, she saw something more than a collaboration. He brought a way of working — precise, hands-on, and deeply committed to the result.

    He became the missing link. Not just to help tell the story, but to build something grounded in a concept shaped by the idea that people come with something inside them, and need the right conditions to make it real.

  • It had always been her intention to shake up the industry of travel.

    Instead of trying to escape.
    Provide a space to reconnect.

    A place where everything is ready.
    Where time is held differently.
    Where people can return to the work they want to do.

    Artel came out of that.

    A space built on makership.
    On process.
    On the belief that what you make — and how you make it — matters.

Annie Harrison

Creator & Founder

From a small town in Western Canada, High River, Alberta. Annie moved to Los Angeles in 2007 — carrying the title of interior designer, with a focus on experience per square foot.

Annie was raised by parents who built their family home by hand, which set the tone for everything that followed. She watched them take the napkin sketch — to the house with the blue tin roof. Walls of flax bales, thick and finished in brut-style stucco, a mountain room, a scaled replica playhouse, and a chimney set with hand-picked rocks. It didn’t follow rules — it set its own. Inside, every medium was available to learn, and she assumed that was every kid’s reality.

The belief that anything was possible carried into her work. Annie is known for projects including Goop Kitchen, Red Light Management, LACMA, Kind Lending, and the Kennedy Marshall Foundation. Each project was designed around the idea that space should function as a tool for her clients to be most successful in.

Christophe Vasseur 

Co-Founder

Christophe Vasseur, the world-renowned baker, started Du Pain et des Idées within a historic Parisian bakery dating back to the late 1800s — a space layered with time, original painted ceilings, worn marble, and decades of use.

He didn’t modernize it. He worked within it.

The bakery is built on a stripped-back philosophy: fewer products, organic ingredients, and everything done by hand. No additives, no shortcuts — just time, temperature, and attention.

What defines it is restraint. A limited offering, executed properly. Bread that takes hours, sometimes days, to develop. Recipes refined through repetition, not reinvention.

Over time, that discipline placed it at the top, named Best Baker of Paris, and recognized globally as one of the most respected bakeries in the world.

People don’t come for something new.
They come because it is done well.