About · 63 Rue Lavaud, Akaroa
Le petit atelier: the small workshop.
Le Petit Atelier builds and gives away practical technology that repairs things, protects the Banks Peninsula environment, and teaches anyone, at any age, how to do the same.
The name
What the name means
It means what it says. The name nods to Akaroa’s French history and to the French accent behind the bench. It names a place, the way a shop on a main street should.
In conversation it’s just “the Atelier”.
Five things we keep noticing
Why a workshop, and why here?
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Repairable things are being replaced by throwaway ones, and repair skills are leaving with the generation that has them.
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Conservation volunteers do by hand what cheap electronics could do for them, because nobody has built, tested and published the tool.
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Plastic waste leaves the Peninsula on a truck, to be dealt with somewhere else, if at all.
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Young people here have little hands-on access to electronics, printing or robotics without the drive to Christchurch.
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Most open-source maker videos and guides are made in the northern hemisphere, for people who already own a workshop.
Our answer is simple to say: build in public, give the design away, and measure what happens.
What we do about itWho
Sebastien, and Petitgen.
Le Petit Atelier is run by Sebastien Mathieu, its founder, maker and host, through his company Petitgen Ltd. The workshop runs one to two days a week. That’s on purpose: small and careful beats big and rushed, and a workshop that burns out publishes nothing.
It isn’t a team of twenty. It’s one person for now, with room at the bench for volunteers — and, we hope, you.
- Run by
- Sebastien Mathieu
- Role
- Founder, maker and host
- Through
- Petitgen Ltd
- Open
- One to two days a week
- Team
- One, plus room at the bench
63 Rue Lavaud · Heritage NZ No. 5337
A cottage from about 1868.
The workshop is one tenancy in a timber-and-iron cottage on Rue Lavaud, built around 1868 and listed by Heritage New Zealand as a Category 2 historic place. Today the workshop shares it with other small businesses.
- Built
- c. 1868
- Listed
- 1991
- List No.
- 5337
- Category
- 2
Over its life it has been a churcha lawyer’s officea housevisitor accommodation
The rule
Reversibility.
Nothing is fixed to the historic fabric. No screws in the walls, no new holes for ducts or cables, no permanent shelves. Every bench and panel stands on its own, braced or weighted, and can leave in a day.
It turns out to be a good constraint. A quiet, dust-controlled, reversible workshop is exactly right for 3D printing, electronics and repair. The machines that are loud or hot — shredding, melting, pressing — run off site, in a garage.
Source: Heritage New Zealand List entry 5337, heritage.org.nz
Values
What we hold to.
- Life first.
- The living world is the client. If a project doesn’t serve it, we don’t build it.
- Inside planetary limits.
- We count material and energy instead of assuming.
- Commons over commodification.
- Knowledge is given away. Only convenience is ever sold.
- Honest documentation.
- Failures are published alongside successes.
- Accessible by default.
- Cheap to build, salvaged materials, no specialist tools needed.
Plus the four rules, painted on the window.
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Rule 1: Every project repairs, reuses or protects something.
If it doesn’t fix a thing, give a thing a second life, or look after the Peninsula, we don’t build it.
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Rule 2: Every design is published under an open licence.
Plans, files and code are free to download, rebuild and improve. Nothing held back to protect a product.
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Rule 3: Recycled or reclaimed materials first.
Dead printers, offcuts, bottles and boxes before anything new. We buy new only when salvage can’t do the job safely.
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Rule 4: No sponsor that conflicts with the mission.
No closed, unrepairable or throwaway brands, and no claim we can’t check in the workshop ourselves. Every sponsor is named on screen.
What it isn’t
Some things we’ve decided not to be.
- Not a content business chasing views. The audience is a means, never the measure.
- Not a shop that happens to make videos.
- Not a place where designs are held back to protect a product.
- Not a startup, and not a second full-time job.
How we keep score · in order
Five measures, in this order.
- 1. Things repaired and kept out of landfill.
- 2. Conservation tools in the field, used by volunteers.
- 3. People taught, especially young people.
- 4. Designs downloaded and rebuilt elsewhere.
- 5. Enough income to keep the workshop open.
We publish the numbers every quarter. Estimates are labelled. A bad quarter is published unchanged.
See the countersCome and see it when the doors open.
Les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.
63 Rue Lavaud, Akaroa 7520Opposite Nomad Wholefoods, the organic refill shop across the street.
Town plan
Rue Lavaud, Akaroa
Across the street from the organic refill shop, about 800 m along the waterfront from the Main Wharf.
- Workshop
- Le Petit Atelier, 63 Rue Lavaud, Akaroa 7520
- Position
- 43°48.26′S 172°58.07′E
- Scale
- 200 m bar, contours 10 to 100 m
Elevation: LINZ / Environment Canterbury, CC BY 4.0. Streets and buildings © OpenStreetMap contributors. Dashed offshore lines are drawn, not soundings.