About Materie

Materie was founded in Aspen, Colorado, by interior designer Nicole Hernandez — not as a retail concept, but as a solution to a problem she kept encountering. For over a decade, Nicole sourced exceptional objects for clients building high-end homes in the Aspen area. The pieces that made those interiors feel genuinely considered — the ones that stopped people in a room — were always the hardest to find. Made in small workshops. Produced in limited quantities. Designed with a specificity that mass manufacturing cannot replicate.

Materie is the place she always wished existed.


Every piece in the collection is chosen the way Nicole chose for clients — slowly, with real criteria, after visiting the maker and understanding the process. Nothing enters the collection without passing a single question: would this still feel right in ten years?
The answer, for everything here, is yes.

The Materie Edit

Every piece passes four criteria before it reaches your space.

Relationship
Every maker in the Materie collection has been visited. We know their workshop, their process, and the people behind the work. There are no intermediaries, no distributor catalogues, no pieces chosen from a photograph. The relationship comes first — and it shows in everything that follows.
Story
Every piece carries the full account of how it was made: the material, the technique, the hands that shaped it, and the place it came from. This isn't background information — it's the reason the object holds its value over time. When you bring a Materie piece into a home, the story travels with it.
Uniqueness
We source from makers who produce in limited quantities, work in methods that cannot be replicated at scale, and bring a specificity to their craft that mass manufacturing cannot approximate. Nothing in the Materie collection is available everywhere. Most of it is available nowhere else.
Quality
We apply a single question to every piece before it enters the collection: would this still feel right in ten years? The materials age rather than date. The construction holds. The design doesn't rely on what is current. Quality, at Materie, is not a finish — it is the reason the piece was chosen in the first place.

Our Values

The objects we choose to live with are not neutral. They reflect how we think about making, about permanence, about the people whose skill produced them.


At Materie, three values are non-negotiable:

Curatorial courage
We say no constantly — to pieces that don't meet the standard, to growth that would compromise the collection, to work we wouldn't stand behind. The willingness to say no is what makes the yes mean something. Every piece in the Materie collection earned its place.
Maker fidelity
We visit every maker. We understand every process. We represent every piece accurately and completely — not as marketing language, but as fact. The relationship with the maker comes before the transaction, and it continues long after the sale.
Provenance as promise.
Every claim Materie makes about a material, a technique, or an origin is true — not approximately, not in spirit, but in verifiable fact. In a market where "artisan" and "handmade" are frequently decorative terms, we hold ourselves to the literal truth of what we say. That is not a constraint. It is the brand.