La Maison du Pastel: A Centuries-Old Color Conjurer

Tucked away in Paris’s 3rd arrondissement is a sanctum of colour. There, Isabelle Roché and Margaret Zayer, the chatelaines of La Maison du Pastel, serve the business’s devoted patrons with the kind of rare attention that only the stewards of a 300-year-old house can provide.  

Over the centuries, pastelists have shared their colour wish lists with the proprietors, who’ve scribbled notes about each request and spent years, if not decades, honing the tonal hues. In the late 19th century, chemist Henri Roché acquired the house and perfected formulas for binding powdery pigments in sticks of lightfast, luminous colour. He consulted such artists as Edgar Degas, who sketched pink-toned ballerinas in fluid poses, their fans and costumes lit with yellow and blue, and James McNeill Whistler, who touched his drawing of windows over a narrow Venice canal with aqua, crimson, and olive.  

When Isabelle Roché, a distant relative of Henri’s, took over the business 25 years ago, she inherited its legacy of craft. She set about reviving the house, sifting through vintage pigments and papers to learn pastel-making, which involves turning taffy-like batter into small batches of hand-rolled sticks.  

Fifteen years ago, Zayer joined the maison as an intern and went on to oversee colour formulation. The two come to Paris once a week from their atelier in the countryside to open their shop on Thursday afternoons for just four hours.  

“The colours are just beyond,” says fashion illustrator Richard Haines. “It’s like buying a box of bonbons—a delicious piece of Paris.” Recently, the maison’s palette surpassed 2,000 colours. The hues draw both artists and fashion designers (Karl Lagerfeld had a set), and devoted patrons know their favourites by their numbers or evocative names like Scarab and Flamboyants.

A new line of fluorescent pastels debuts this summer, promising to ignite creativity in ways yet to be seen.