The house · Why we exist
A village is not a place. It is a lineage of hands. LangSoul exists so that lineage has somewhere to go.
The craft villages around Hà Nội have practised one skill each for centuries. They survived dynasties, wars and collectivisation. What they are not surviving is the souvenir trade — the pressure to make faster, cheaper, and the same. We started LangSoul in 2024 to be the other kind of customer.
01 — What we hold to
Five promises, to the villages and to you
I
We name the maker.
Every work carries the name of the person who made it and the village it came from, on the page and on the card inside the crate. A work without its maker is only an object.
II
We pay for time, not pieces.
The artisan sets the price for the months a work takes, and is paid in full before it leaves the village. We never ask for a discount for quantity, because we never ask for quantity.
III
We carry; we do not design.
We do not send drawings to the villages and ask them to make our ideas. We go and look at what they make, and choose. When a collector commissions a work, the artisan's hand decides the answer.
IV
We go to the village.
Every work is photographed in the workshop that made it, in the light it was made in. We visit each village at least once a season, and we take collectors with us.
V
We ship slowly, on purpose.
Five days to crate, a fortnight to travel, thirty days to decide. A work that took a season to make should not be hurried in its last mile — and should be returnable without a quarrel.
02 — How a work is chosen
One in twenty, and only from the old recipe
Each village has workshops that produce for export in quantity, and a few that keep to the original method: natural lacquer rather than synthetic, hand-split rattan rather than machine-cut, a glaze recipe nobody has written down. We work only with the second kind.
From a kiln load, a season's weaving, a drawer of filigree, we choose perhaps one piece in twenty. The rest is not bad; it is simply not the piece. The artisan knows which we will take before we do.
03 — The people in Hà Nội
A small house, by design
The founder
Spends a week of every month in the villages and the rest answering letters from collectors. Every work on LangSoul was chosen in person.
Village relations
Keeps the conversation with the workshops: what is drying, what is firing, which commission is ready for its photograph.
Crating & care
Builds each crate around the work in the Hà Nội studio, writes the care sheet and the provenance card, and photographs the lid before it closes.
“We would rather carry forty works a year that we can stand behind than four hundred we cannot name.”
Write to the house04 — The studio
A room in Hà Nội, open by appointment
The works pass through one room in Hà Nội on their way out of the country. If you are in Hà Nội, come and see what is waiting to travel, and we will take you to a village the next morning.
- Address
- 974 Láng Street, Láng Ward, Hà Nội, Việt Nam
- Hours
- By appointment, Tuesday to Saturday
- Telephone
- +84 889 99 69 22
- Write
- [email protected]
- Operated by
- DUPOMA Co., Ltd · Legal notice
