One bench, one artwork at a time.
Le Custode is an atelier in Amsterdam that makes a single kind of object: a wall artwork composed by hand from a child's own drawings.
Who makes them
Everything from opening the parcel to fixing the hangers happens at one bench. That is a deliberate limit, not a stage before scaling: the reason the composition works is that one person looked at all forty drawings before cutting the first one.
What it costs to work this way
An artwork takes five weeks and cannot be made faster by adding people. The bench works in the order commissions arrive, and Christmas closes in early November because the queue is real rather than a sales device.
It also means the prices are published rather than quoted. Anyone can see what every format costs before giving us an email address, which is unusual for made-to-order work and, we think, the minimum you should expect.
What we will not do
- Work from scans. The original paper is the object. A printed reproduction is a poster, and it should cost what a poster costs.
- Clean up the age marks. The fold, the coffee ring, the chewed corner — those stay. Why.
- Keep anything. Every unused drawing goes back in the same parcel as the artwork.
- Publish your child's work without asking you first, in writing, with no consequence for saying no.