1 mins
JOHAN COLLARD
A peek into lutherie workshops around the world
LUTHIER
ALL PHOTOS JOHAN COLLARD
LOCATION Clichy, France
Clichy is a small town about four miles north-west of the centre of Paris. I moved my workshop here a few months ago, to take advantage of the lower rents. The workshop is in a building owned by Intencity, a network of collectives around France, exclusively for artisansIt provides space for us to work at discount rates, and I work close to a furniture maker and a sign writer, among others. My allotted space is 15 sq m, but I can also use other areas of the building; there’s a room in the basement with good acoustics for testing instruments, for instance, and I sometimes take newly varnished instruments up to the roof to dry them.
I studied Baroque instruments at West Dean College in the UK, and I’m pleased to say there’s a lot of interest in them in Paris, especially from the younger generation, who always want to learn about the sound differences between Baroque and modern instruments. Things have remained busy for me during the past year, particularly because most of my work comes from double bass repairs. After finishing my training in the UK, I spent a few years working with the Parisian double bass maker Bruno Brette. I learnt a lot from him, and when his shop closed down in 2009 because of the economic recession, he gifted me a lot of his old tools.Specialising in repair work has come in useful recently because over the past year, lots of people have contacted the workshop having found old violins in their attics and started to practise again. This has created more work for a lot of luthiers in the city, and kept us busy even in the midst of lockdown!
Some luthiers like to work in silence but I usually have music on while I’m working, hence the radio in the cabinet on the left. Sometimes I listen to classical music but Paris has a very good jazz station which I choose most of the time.