The Oldest Houses in the World, Gathered in Red Hill
From a small room in Red Hill, Amelie & Frank's represents some of the oldest houses in the world.
There is a particular kind of maker we are drawn to. Not the newest or the loudest but the house that has done one thing exceptionally well for centuries, refining rather than reinventing and trusting time to do part of the work. These are makers who measure themselves in generations. We seek them out. We bring them home to the Mornington Peninsula.
Santa Maria Novella
The apothecary of Santa Maria Novella was begun by Dominican friars in Florence in 1221 and is widely recognised as the world's oldest pharmacy. It has traded as an apothecary since 1612. Behind that continuity sits eight centuries of botanical knowledge, formulas kept and repeated until they became a kind of inheritance. To hold a bottle of its rose water is to hold something that has been made, in more or less the same way, for longer than most nations have existed. You can find the house here.
Trudon
Trudon has made candles in Paris since 1643, which makes it the oldest candle maker still working anywhere in the world. It once supplied the French royal court and lit the halls of Versailles long before electricity, a Manufacture Royale whose light shaped how a whole era saw itself after dark. That lineage is still present in the weight and the scent of every candle it makes today. You can find Trudon here.
Frapin
Frapin is a cognac family who have worked the same land in the Charente since 1270, twenty generations on a single estate. There is no shortcut to that, no way to acquire it or accelerate it. It can only be lived, one harvest after another, by people who chose to stay. Their work is available here.
What these houses share
What unites them is not age for its own sake. Age alone proves very little. What unites them is patience, craft handed carefully from one generation to the next and a quiet insistence on quality over scale. They could all have grown faster. They chose instead to grow better and to stay recognisably themselves while the world around them changed.
Age alone proves nothing. What lasts is the decision, made again each year, to do one thing exceptionally well.
Bringing these houses together in one place changes how you see them. Set beside one another, the friars in Florence, the candlemakers in Paris and the cognac family in the Charente stop looking like separate luxuries and start to look like one idea expressed three ways. Each is the answer to a single quiet question. What happens when a maker refuses to hurry.
This is the same belief that shaped Polperro, the family vineyard a few minutes from the shop. A vineyard cannot be hurried. It answers to weather and to patience and to the slow accumulation of small correct decisions. It rewards people who think in decades rather than seasons. Standing among old houses in Florence or Paris, that way of working felt familiar rather than foreign.
None of these houses arrives here by accident. I travel to them. I sit in their workshops and walk their farms. I earn the right to bring them home. I only bring back what I would happily live with myself.
A room in Red Hill might seem an unlikely home for houses like these. That is rather the point. You do not need to be in Florence or Paris to live with the best of what they make. You need someone who has gone there, chosen carefully and carried it back with real conviction. That is what we do.
That is the work of Amelie & Frank's. Not to stock the most but to choose the truest and to gather in one small room in Red Hill a handful of the oldest and most considered houses on earth. You can read more about how we came to do this in Our Story.