A small academy, deliberately so.

I founded Maison Academy on a question I could not stop returning to: where, today, would I send a young practitioner who wanted to be trained in the way I was trained?

The schools that trained me — the ones that lived in tight rooms in Paris and Zurich and that did not advertise — were closing, or had closed. The schools that had replaced them were not replacements. They were a different kind of business. They taught the surface gestures of the discipline and not the discipline. The young practitioner who arrived at my door asking to apprentice with me arrived already late, and I had no school to send her to.

We started Maison because the answer should not have to be "there is no school left." The European classical tradition is not a museum object. It is a living curriculum that has spent a century being refined, and that asks its students for a particular kind of patience that the modern industry has decided is inconvenient. We disagree with that decision, and we will operate as though the decision were never made.

What we have added — modestly — is the literacy of the instruments that the practitioners of the next thirty years will be working with. Computer-vision dermal analysis. Calibrated case histories. The discipline of reading our own clinical data as carefully as we read the texts. None of this replaces the order of the discipline. It augments it.

Maison Academy is small on purpose. The Foundation cohort is twenty-four. The Master cohort is sixteen. The Elite cohort is eight, by interview. We do not intend to grow.

If you are reading this letter, I hope it finds you in the right kind of season — the kind in which you are willing to spend the first six months of your training reading texts before laying a single hand on a single face. If that sentence reads to you as a barrier, this is not the right academy for you. If it reads to you as a relief, you may already know everything else you need to know.

I look forward to meeting you in Paris.