Building mania
It has been 20 years since Caroline and Tristan Fournier started to dedicate their life to luxury model cars: mechanical works of art, unique and very realistic, made to order for racing and silversmith's lovers. The result of that for Caroline and Tristan Fournier is a consistent amount of hours spent bent in front of a flickering light, worsening their long-sightedness to reach perfection on a 1/8-scale model. But it is a contagious passion.
Those Clermontois are crazy!
There is something almost religious about dissecting every single car, scrutinizing and making an inventory of each detail - from the gloss mahogany dashboard to the Chesterfield seat in lamb skin, from the clothed hood doubled with nubuck to the crystal lantern - to deliver a scrupulous replica of the original. There is no excess speed in the Clermontois atelier but at least 2 500 hours of laborious and meticulous work (that is to say almost as much as for a life-size model!) will be needed to make a 1914 Type 22 Bugatti to the 1/8th scale.
Why all this? To satisfy a consumingpassion for cars of course that allowed this school teacher and this former dentist to meet. Throughout 20 years of expert work, only 20 models, always unique and made on order, will have come out from the atelier. This was a crazy bet, an almost ecclesiastical vocation... A real luxury...
And yet it is working...
Alain Prost and Hervé Ogliastro, Louis Vuitton's grand son, to give a few examples of clients, but also the most prestigious car brands such as Ferrari, the atelier is running full throttle to offer their happy collectors the model of their dreams. In terms of finances of course, the price of a mechanical model is flirting with that of the originals (100 000 € for the Bugatti model), less the propulsion engine.
Indeed all the mechanical and technical details, from the break to the carburettor, have rigorously been reproduced, the absence of engine will allow you to avoid finding a garage where to get you new toy repaired after your grand-son will have pressed the start pedal whilst sparing our planet from more pollution. Could that be the new solution for a carbon dioxide-free environment?
There is something almost religious about dissecting every single car, scrutinizing and making an inventory of each detail - from the gloss mahogany dashboard to the Chesterfield seat in lamb skin, from the clothed hood doubled with nubuck to the crystal lantern - to deliver a scrupulous replica of the original. There is no excess speed in the Clermontois atelier but at least 2 500 hours of laborious and meticulous work (that is to say almost as much as for a life-size model!) will be needed to make a 1914 Type 22 Bugatti to the 1/8th scale.
Why all this? To satisfy a consumingpassion for cars of course that allowed this school teacher and this former dentist to meet. Throughout 20 years of expert work, only 20 models, always unique and made on order, will have come out from the atelier. This was a crazy bet, an almost ecclesiastical vocation... A real luxury...
And yet it is working...
Alain Prost and Hervé Ogliastro, Louis Vuitton's grand son, to give a few examples of clients, but also the most prestigious car brands such as Ferrari, the atelier is running full throttle to offer their happy collectors the model of their dreams. In terms of finances of course, the price of a mechanical model is flirting with that of the originals (100 000 € for the Bugatti model), less the propulsion engine.
Indeed all the mechanical and technical details, from the break to the carburettor, have rigorously been reproduced, the absence of engine will allow you to avoid finding a garage where to get you new toy repaired after your grand-son will have pressed the start pedal whilst sparing our planet from more pollution. Could that be the new solution for a carbon dioxide-free environment?
Janvier 2008
