L'Impatience: Born Out of a Desire to Slow Things Down

Meet former advertising art director and executive producer turned ceramists Jerome and Benedicte Leclere of L'Impatience Ceramics. This French husband and wife team relocated from France in 2008. After hopscotching through Vancouver BC, Toronto ON, and Brooklyn, NY the couple have settled into their permanent home in the Catskills region, based on the border of Saugerties and Woodstock, where they are also currently working on expanding and relocating into a much larger studio!

I caught up with Benedicte Leclere to talk about L'Impatience's design process and how she and Jerome have been spending their time. 

Hi Benedicte! Would you please take our readers through L'Impatience's design process - from where do you draw your sources of creative inspiration, and how does that translate in your designs? How do you choose or curate what pieces or collections you'll debut?

We find a lot of inspiration in Japanese and Scandinavian designs. Simplicity, functionality and elegance are what usually drives our creation. We’re constantly thinking of new objects and new forms, and how to make them the most functional and enjoyable to use, while adding just the right touch of beauty and elegance for the home. When creating a new piece or a new collection, we always try to keep the big picture in mind and how every piece will work with each other, as well as how it will work with other collections. We like to have a feeling of unity in between all our pieces, and being able to mix each piece with one another, even in between the different collections.

My Trove Box is very excited for L'Impatience's new studio that you will be moving into. Please tell us more about the new space and how your choices informed the interior design and evolution of the space.

We are so excited to be moving into this new space, we've had a hard time finding one that's big enough, could have potential retail opportunity and be affordable (in an area that we like). Eventually, we found all of this with this space. A friend in Woodstock introduced us to this amazing architect based in Kingston, Scott Dutton of Dutton Architecture, who has been renovating multiple old brick factory buildings. The space is pretty raw which is exactly what we wanted to allow us to create freely and arrange it the way we want. There are lots of textures with the old bricks, century old wood beams and raw concrete. These walls have seen so many different things throughout the years, so many different uses and we are excited to bring our own part of its story. And the perks of having an architect as landlord is that it's been great to plan ahead and we have been working closely together to set up all new electrics/plumbing and modify the space to suit our needs, while making it beautiful and inspiring. We have street access which will allow us to occasionally open our studio to the public or organize sales or events with other creatives in the community.

Thank you L'Impatience - we are so excited to have your L'Impure Bouquet Vase featured in our Spring box!

Readers: The above is a short excerpt from our in-depth feature article with L'Impatience Ceramics in our Discover Delight Design Delivered quarterly e-magazine that members can access via our Spring box subscription.