PALME & HOUSE

From Vietnamese Villages to Canadian Homes. Made the Long Way.

01 / OUR STORY

We live between two countries.

For years, we’ve called Hanoi home. The noise, the pace, the street food at midnight, the way the city moves — we chose it, and it chose us back. Hanoi has that effect. Walk through the Old Quarter and you feel the layers of it — Vietnamese, Chinese, French — in the architecture, in the food, in the rhythm of a city that has absorbed everything and made it its own. The wide boulevards, the shuttered villas, the baguettes sold from bicycle baskets at dawn.

One of us grew up speaking French in Montréal. The other grew up by the sea in Halifax. We met in Toronto — that city of arrivals — built a life there, and eventually found ourselves here.

Canada never left us. We go back when we can. And when we do, we always bring things with us.

Not souvenirs. Not tourist trinkets. The real things — a lacquered tray from a workshop in Ninh Bình, a seagrass basket woven in a village outside Nghệ An, a set of coconut bowls from a maker in Hội An who learned the craft from her mother. The things you find when you've been somewhere long enough to know where to look.

02 / HOW IT STARTED

It started with a question.

On one of those trips home to Toronto, we laid everything out on a table. Friends and family gathered around — the way they always do — and the questions started.

‘Where did you get this? Can I get one? How do I find these?’

We didn’t have a good answer. You couldn’t find them easily in Canada. The things that made them worth having — the specific village, the specific maker, the technique passed down through generations — those things don't survive the journey through a trading company and a big-box retailer. The story gets lost. What arrives is a basket. What should arrive is a basket with a name behind it.

So we went back to Vietnam with a different kind of attention.

03 / THE MAKERS

We visited the makers.

We drove roads lined with palms to workshops in the north and south of Vietnam. We sat with weavers in Nghệ An who harvest seagrass from the tidal flats at the edge of their village. We watched lacquerware artisans in Kim Son set shell fragments into wet lacquer by hand, one piece at a time, twelve hours to finish a single tray. We met the communities where these crafts have sustained families for generations — not as a heritage project, but as a living practice.

We sat with weavers in Nghệ An who harvest seagrass from the tidal flats at the edge of their village. We watched lacquerware artisans in Kim Son set shell fragments into wet lacquer by hand, one piece at a time, twelve hours to finish a single tray. We met the communities where these crafts have sustained families for generations — not as a heritage project, but as a living practice.

We chose suppliers who are community-rooted and craft-committed. People who understand that the way something is made is part of what it is. We don’t work with trading companies or anonymous factories. We work with the people whose names are behind what they make.

04 / THE NAME

Palme & House.

The name was born from all of this.

Palme — because in French, it means hand. The hands of the artisans who make every piece in this collection. And because of the palm trees — the long-leafed palms that line the roads of these villages, that you pass on the way to the workshop, that are as much a part of these objects as the materials themselves. For one of us, French is the first language — the one you dream in, the one that arrives before thought. It felt right that the name of this brand would carry that.

And Hanoi carries it too. The French left their mark on this city in its boulevards, its architecture, its coffee culture — and the Vietnamese made all of it their own. Palme sits in that same space: a French word, in a Vietnamese context, travelling home to Canada.

House — because that is where these things belong. Not in a gallery. Not behind glass. In a home, in use, held by the people who asked ‘where did you get this?’

Palme & House. We bring the craft, the journey, and the hands that made it — to your home.