The House That Builds Everything: Inside Hermès’ Ateliers Horizons

While there's a version of the Hermès story most people know: scarves, saddles, the Birkin bag with its waiting list and its origin myth, there’s another, namely Ateliers Horizons, the division where that same appetite for craft gets pointed at things nobody was expecting — foosball tables, birdcages, cars, surfboards. It isn't a spin-off or a novelty arm.

A Workshop With A Naval Navigator

Running the atelier is Axel de Beaufort, who has held the post for more than thirteen years and arrived with a degree in naval design and architecture from the University of Southampton — a background that shows in how the workshop approaches engineering, not just decoration. Roughly a third of what Ateliers Horizons makes is still bag work, produced from the original Faubourg workshop where Hermès began. Another third goes toward bigger, stranger projects: restored and retrimmed cars, of which the team completes around four or five a year, each one rebuilt in leather to a client's exact colour and finish, sometimes with fabric woven specially for the job.

Enter The Pippa Speaker

Among the atelier's more recent pieces is a hi-res wireless speaker wrapped in Pippa cowhide, built as a cube with softened corners that manages to look restrained and feel substantial at once. It's no lightweight either — 1,600 watts, driven through coaxial speakers tuned for a clean, natural sound, with carbon fibre components doing much of the work on reproduction. The frame underneath is ultra-rigid wood, dressed in leather with the same even topstitching found across the house's bags, and the whole thing runs off a dedicated app on iOS and Android. It works solo, in stereo pairs, as part of a multiroom setup, or simply as a speaker for the television. Beyond the tan Pippa cowhide shown here, Hermès also offers it in Hunter cowhide, in black, indigo blue, and its signature rouge H.

Heading To India

The speaker is set to launch in India later this year — a notable step for Ateliers Horizons, whose special-order pieces have largely stayed confined to a handful of flagship markets.

Among all of this, De Beaufort is unambiguous about where the atelier draws its line. Clients occasionally arrive wanting an orange car with an orange interior and the Hermès name written across everything. He turns them away. It isn't about chasing the biggest name attached to a project either — surfboards, he's said, don't go to the highest-profile rider, but to whoever actually has something to express through the object. Whether that's a car, a skateboard, or a table football set painted by hand, the same rule applies: function first, spectacle a distant second, and never a shortcut in sight.