1 mins
MY SPACE
LUTHIERS
JAN & MATTHIJS STRICK
LOCATION Brussels, Belgium
Our business, Maison Bernard, was founded in 1868 in Liège by the brothers Nicolas and Victor Bernard. They focused on making pianos but under Nicolas’s son André, who trained at Gand & Bernardel in Paris, the firm came to specialise in violin making. André’s sons Joseph and Jacques ran the business from 1930 until 1986, when Jacques handed it over to his apprentices Jan Strick and Pierre Guillaume. That was when the business relocated to this building in Brussels. Now Jan and Matthijs run the violin workshop while Pierre and his son Simon have the bow making department downstairs. We think that this is the oldest luthier workshop in Europe.
There are currently four people working here: Baptiste Argouarc’h and Verena Behrendt have been here for 18 and 10 years respectively. We have five workbenches set up in total, including a planing bench that can be seen behind the white double doors.
Upstairs is where we keep our varnish ingredients and UV cabinet, which we all use from time to time. Most of our work comes from restoring instruments we’ve bought, and selling them at a profit. Repair work comes to about 20 per cent of our total revenue, and we make around 10 new instruments per year.
In March it was announced that Maison Bernard had won the inaugural PFV Prize, awarded by a consortium of wine makers to independent family-owned businesses. Th that Matthijs can train at a workshop in Chicago, while Jan intends to complete his long-awaited publication on the historical makers of Flanders. For the past 30 years we’ve searched for Dutch and Flemish instruments for research purposes, and have restored a fair number; the violin in the bottom right of the picture is a Hendrik Jacobs that we’ve had for 25 years. Now it’s finally playable again, after a seven-month restoration.