ModernTribute

28/09/2026

Guhl or Pechère?

I own a pair of 97 cm Eternit saucers. Search them and the internet says W***y Guhl. Search further and it says René Pechère. One listing says both at once.

Twenty listings repeating a name are often one claim, copied. Until a catalogue or a model number settles it, my label stays honest: commonly attributed to Guhl, under investigation.

Do you know an Eternit catalogue from the 1950s–60s that shows this model? Tell me in the comments.

Full investigation on Substack — link in bio.

25/09/2026

Things I kept.

Long before I started looking closely at old houses, I was looking closely at objects.

Furniture, lighting, glass and ceramics — mostly Scandinavian, mostly things I bought because there was something in the proportion, material or construction that felt right.

Some have been with me for years. Some were part of Modern Tribute in Oslo. And some have simply been waiting in storage.

I’ve started bringing the collection back out, photographing it properly and making selected pieces available again through Modern Tribute.

It feels less like reopening a shop than continuing the same conversation:
what is worth keeping?




Century Modern
-the-intersection-of

24/09/2026

Before you decide what a house needs, learn what it already does well.

Where the morning and evening light is. Which room stays cool. What you see from the front door. The answers decide what you do first, what you keep, and where your money goes.

The colours, the patina, the woodwork you fell for: insulation, wiring and plumbing will touch all of it. Decide early what you keep.

I've put together a free checklist of what to look at and film when you view a property in France. The full essay "how to make the French property dream real" is on The Restorer's Eye. Link in bio.

Save this for your next viewing and Download the full filming workflow in Substack.

23/09/2026

The most important decision in these photographs is one you cannot see.

La Voûte is a vaulted cellar in our home in Goudargues. The left of every frame is how it was. The right is this June.

What people notice is on the right: the lime, the travertine, the old door, the courtyard. None of it is the work.

The work is under the floor.

This house has no foundations. The wall simply carries on below ground, standing partly on rock and partly on sand, and that buried part of it stays damp.

That sounds like a fault. It is how the building holds itself up.

A wall bedded in lime is not rigid. It moves a little, season after season, and when it moves the lime cracks. The part most people never hear: moisture dissolves free lime inside the wall and carries it into those cracks, where it crystallises. The wall repairs itself, and has done for centuries.

So a cellar like this is humid, and meant to be. The job is not to stop the water but to give it somewhere to go, so it drains instead of pooling under the walls.

Which is why we did not pour a concrete slab. Concrete is not permeable. It doesn't remove the water, it channels. Water that can't go evaporate through a concrete slab goes sideways into the walls, and comes back as damp and salt inside the room.

We dug out 40 cm and rebuilt the ground in layers: sand, a hérisson of loose stone, rolled stone, geotextile, perforated pipes, to create a ventilated limecrete slab. Fourteen tonnes moved by hand. The floor drains, and it breathes. enough, but no too much, the way it should.

Two smaller decisions, same logic. We rendered the vault by hand rather than flat, three months, longer than smoothing it would have been. And raising one stone door head is what made the layout possible: the structure decides the plan, not the other way round.

Anyone can lay a floor. Knowing which floor a building can survive is a different job.

21/09/2026

https://ericbeugnet.substack.com/p/how-to-make-the-french-property-dream?r=8aj6bp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Learning to Read a Property in France

11/09/2026

05/09/2026

There is a winter in every renovation where you spend a great deal of money and the house looks exactly as it did in October.

Nothing to photograph. Nothing to show anyone who visits. Wire inside walls, a drain under a floor, a roof detail nobody will ever see — and the room you're standing in is the same room.

That isn't a mistake. It's the first of your two budgets being spent.

There are two, and only one of them is visual.

The building wrote the first one long before you arrived: safe, dry, warm, wired, drained. The second is the reason you came, features, the beams in the kitchen, the terrace at the right height, the room with the light that made you say yes.

Yours can wait five years and cost nothing. The house cannot. Water finds the floor.

So keep two numbers, and never let one fund the other.

Which one are you spending right now ?

27/08/2026

Everyone knows a renovation costs more than planned. It's the least surprising fact in the business — and people go on being surprised by it anyway. We did.

Not because we weren't listening. Because knowing something in general is different from accepting it about your own house, in the week you fall in love with it.

Your artisan can't tell you either, and he isn't hiding anything. He's standing in front of a wall. He can price the wall. He can't price what's inside it, because nobody has opened it — not him, not you, not the last four people who owned the place.

So do the math properly. Then hold it loosely.

When reality arrives, adjust the vision instead of the mood. Not abandoning it — keeping its core. Ask what the place is really for, keep that, let the rest wait. Our rental unit is finished. The second one hasn't started. That isn't a project that went wrong.

And when the math comes in your favour, extend the vision. We are quick to shrink and strangely slow to grow.

It isn't a renovation with a budget attached. It's a building adventure.

What's the one thing in your project you'd never cut?

Full article on Substack Link In Bio.