De Leeuw awarded the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label (EPV)

On 20 July 2026, the French State awarded De Leeuw the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label (France's Living Heritage Company), by order of the Prefect of the Île-de-France region.

The EPV label is the French State's distinction reserved for companies holding "rare, renowned or ancestral savoir-faire, based on the mastery of traditional or highly technical skills". In instrument making, the label distinguishes Henri Selmer Paris, founded in 1885, and Buffet Crampon, founded in 1825. Across all sectors, 1 247 companies hold it to date, across all sectors: Hermès, Baccarat, Puiforcat and the Champagne house Louis Roederer. The notion of living heritage has an equivalent only in Japan, which applies it to individuals by designating its masters Living National Treasures, Ningen Kokuhō (人間国宝); France chose to apply it to companies. This recognition now extends to our atelier De Leeuw, founded in 2021.

The word living is in the name of the label. It designates a savoir-faire in practice, passed on, and carried by a company that lives from it. What it recognises at the De Leeuw atelier, in Pont-Sainte-Maxence, are the disciplines of the French fine woodworking crafts applied to an instrument that had never received them. For four centuries, France has raised wood to the rank of art, from fine cabinetmaking to instrument making. Every great instrument found its own: the piano with Pleyel and Érard, the saxophone with Sax, who invented it in Paris. The guitar itself has a French history: it was played at Versailles at the end of the seventeenth century. In the hands of the Voboam, luthiers in Paris under Louis XIV, it was treated as a piece of fine craftsmanship, inlaid with tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl. The Metropolitan Museum holds their instruments.

The electric guitar was born two and a half centuries later, elsewhere, an industrial object designed to be assembled in series. "The electric guitar is the last wooden stringed instrument, and the only one that no one had yet brought into the French métiers d'art. We founded the atelier to bring it in, and so that it remains there," says David Schwarz, co-founder of De Leeuw. The atelier applies to it the disciplines that made the greatness of France's fine woodworking crafts: lutherie, fine cabinetmaking, marquetry and sculpture.

The commission examined this savoir-faire, and the reflection from which it was born. Before designing his first guitar, Quentin De Leeuw, co-founder and Maître Artisan d'Art, set out to master all the woodworking crafts the guitar requires: "Sculpting an instrument in the French tradition demands a hand that masters every discipline of wood." He devoted thirteen years to mastering them: lutherie, fine cabinetmaking, wood and straw marquetry, ornamental sculpture, four disciplines rarely united in a single hand. Today, he passes them on to the apprentices who train at his side. Every instrument follows from these disciplines. Sculpted by hand, without digital machinery, from the raw log to the finished piece, in French walnut and maple. Built around a one-piece neck-through construction, the construction that demands the most of the luthier and admits no shortcuts. "You do not reach the highest standard of instrument making by the simplest path. You reach it by the one that demands everything of the hand," he says. A De Leeuw is not assembled. It is sculpted.

"A savoir-faire only exists once recognised, by its peers, by institutions, by artists and by the houses that present it. That is what we have built," says David Schwarz. That, too, is what the commission examined. As early as 2022, the Opéra national de Paris invited the De Leeuw atelier to the Opéra Bastille, among the instrument makers gathered for "Tous à l'Opéra". In May 2025, the France Pavilion at the Osaka World Expo welcomed it for a day. In November 2025, the Nina Air in straw marquetry represented French instrument making on the presidential tribune at the Élysée Palace, at the Grande Exposition du Fabriqué en France. Its instruments have equipped Miraval Studios since 2023; they have been played on the stage of the Stade de France and at Coachella. Artists such as Pete Jonas (Suki Waterhouse), Alex Grolée (Lucky Love) and Danny Marta (Gipsy Kings by André Reyes) play them, and guitarists trained at Berklee College of Music commission them today. They are distributed in Tokyo, Osaka, Los Angeles, Dubai, Geneva, London, Nice and Paris.

This State label is awarded for five years. It has just been granted to our atelier, which is exactly five years old, for a savoir-faire that has found a national and international audience within a few years. What the State recognises is not a tradition preserved: it is a tradition beginning.

De Leeuw appears in the official register of Entreprises du Patrimoine Vivant. The atelier's page can be consulted on the EPV website.