Pass through the door of the Asnières workshops and you are greeted with the tang of freshly-cut wood. Lengths of poplar but also beech and exotic okoumé are cut for use in the trunks and special orders created here. Further on, the noble skins of the leather stock provide their own rich perfume. Sounds are also evocative and timeless: the hammering of a nail into a trunk, the whir of a sewing machine. The eye captures the movement of a living, breathing atelier. Workstations are manned by men and women of all ages and origins. Many of the manual gestures repeated daily by the master artisans here have not changed over centuries, and would remain familiar to Louis Vuitton himself: the careful applying of glue to Monogram canvas in order to stretch it across the wood structure, nailing the rigid lozine to the edges and corners of a trunk to ensure solidity, the malletage or intricate criss-crossing of tape inside the trunk lid… 

When the Asnières ateliers were constructed in 1859, he used the top floor as a home.