A studio on the Piscataqua
Belle Vie is a design studio and a millwork shop on the New Hampshire Seacoast, working out of Somersworth. We draw the room, and we build the cabinets that go in it. The same people who set the proportions on a kitchen elevation are the ones who run the face frames the next week. Design and millwork live under one roof because the work is better when they do.
One roof, one conversation
The studio side handles design. Plans, elevations, schedules, and the small thousand decisions that determine how a room will be lived in. It is the part of the work that happens before any wood is cut.
The shop side handles the work. Cases milled, doors hung, drawers fit, finish sprayed. Cabinets that get loaded onto a truck and installed by people who know what’s inside them, because they put it there.
Same roof, same conversation, same accountability from first sketch to last reveal. A homeowner who wants to know why a hinge was specified the way it was can stand next to the person who chose it.
Four positions, taken
The interior of a cabinet matters as much as the door. A drawer is opened ten times for every time someone reads the front of a cabinet across a room. We build the inside the way most shops would build the part you can see, because the inside is the part you live with.
Doors and face frames should be painted together, in one booth, in one pass. Most shops accept the factory-painted-door, site-painted-faceframe split, and the seam shows in raking light at the toe-kick and the scribe. We do not accept it. Doors arrive unfinished.
Painted in our shop, all of it.
A finite menu of choices is more honest than infinite custom. Seven door profiles. Fourteen finishes. A short list of inserts. The list is sized to the decisions a homeowner is actually equipped to make in a single conversation, and to the standards we know we can hold across a year of projects. Custom is available, and it is treated as the exception it is, not the default.
The work is the content. Doors from a partner shop. Finish from us. Drawer boxes from a partner shop. Assembly from us. The supply chain runs through partners we trust, and the writing on the wall is about what the cabinet does in the room, not who made which part of it.
The Piscataqua, then outward
The Piscataqua is the spine. Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter, North Berwick, Kittery, the inland reach down toward Concord. It is the coast the studio is built around, and the geography is in the work. The names on the finish wall (Piscataqua, Salt Marsh, Old Pier, Sailcloth, Granite Coast) come from this stretch of water. We take projects across New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island when the fit is right, but the studio is an NH Seacoast studio and the room you walk into is sized to that.
The clients we keep
General contractors who want a millwork shop they can hand a set of plans to and stop worrying about. Homeowners on direct projects who care about how the inside of a drawer is built. Designers who want one shop responsible for the whole interior, drawing through install. We do not do volume builders, flip houses, or work where the cabinet is treated as a commodity priced by the linear foot.
A short list, finished by hand, by the people who drew it.