Sylvain Maenhout:

Paris - Forging a new life

There’s something really hypnotic about the forging process. The hot steel, this really cold hard material that you can shape as you want. It’s just just a bit of magic really. When you actually have finished the work, sharpen the knife and you just slice through some kind of tomato or whatever else. And the feeling that you get at this point is is just wow.

Hi. This is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists and artisans tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today, Mike Axinn and I are in Paris meeting artisans. Finding workspace here has become increasingly difficult. Rents are high, there are restrictions on noise and dust.

We weren’t surprised to find that Sylvain Maenhout, the first artisan we’re meeting, has recently moved to an eastern suburb 10 kilometers out of town. We catch the area from Garde Du Lyon, and in twenty minutes are in Notion Sur Man. A short walk from the quiet station, we find Sylvain’s Street, where pretty 1920’s houses have family cars parked outside. In the garden, we meet his partner, Orilli, a journalist, crouching in a flower bed, pruning roses. Our interview will include a visit to Sylvain’s workshops, one dedicated to metalwork with milling machine, anvil and hammer, and forging equipment, and a second space for woodwork and knife assembly.

We asked him to introduce himself.

I’m Sylvain Maenhout. I’m 42, actually. I’m French based around Paris. I know Jean Sur Mar. And I’ve been a knife maker, a professional knife maker for the past five years now.

I had a first career in IT services and I decided to move to craftsmanship a few years ago. I’m the father of two. My partner, Aurelie, who is a journalist and I’m now working from a warehouse which makes things very easy and allows us to kind of manage work life balance as well, which was one of the main purpose of my change of career. And obviously working from home, which has been the case for the past six months now or nine months since we moved into the house, gives a lot of flexibility. So the kids’ school is at the end of the street basically, like five minutes away, and if ever there’s any urgency I can just, you know, stop my and go there.

Did you have the seeds of craftsmanship in your childhood or in your family?

Actually not at all. No, that was a weird thing. Well, come from the countryside in the North Of France. My parents are from the generation where you used to do a lot of things yourself just because you just didn’t necessarily have a lot of money, so they built a lot of stuff themselves in the house. So I’ve always seen my father do things with his hands, but not as a job, right?

Just, you know, because it needed to be done. What happened is obviously I’m from a generation where we’ve been pushed a bit to intellectual kind of careers, if possible, which I did. And actually when I announced to my father that I wanted to change career and go to craftsmanship, he went like, oh, not you, come on. Because, you know, all their life they thought to go from a low kind of career like in the factories and blah blah blah to the office kind of jobs to have better wages, etcetera. And I was telling him I was doing exactly the opposite.

So it actually took him probably three to four years before really accepting my choice and he’s probably still a bit worried but now he starts to see that first I’m happy with it and second that I can kind of live out of it. To me going to a manual kind of work is not a bad path to take, not at all. And you can be first you can be very happy with it and second depending on the craft you choose, obviously, but you can live out of it very well as well. Sometimes better than classic office kind of jobs.

I’m wondering why knives?

It’s not like one day you wake up and you say, okay, I’m just gonna change career. I didn’t even know how to build a knife before. I wasn’t into knife collecting for a long time in my head. I said I want to work with my hands sometimes and it basically got more and more precise that I want to do some knives for some reason. I believe it came from my habit of cooking.

I’ve always liked the feelings of cutting, slicing when cooking. And we’re both from families where you cook quite a bit and the interest I have in using what I’m building.

What does it mean to be a knife maker in France? How does that fit in? Well,

that’s kind of a very interesting question because most of the time we speak of France as one of the big knife making countries. It is true somehow but it is true on the folding knives side of things. So you will find the layols, the tier, this kind of areas where there’s a tradition of building folding knives and a bit of table cutlery. When it comes to kitchen knives, we’re not particularly good, I believe. If you want to try and make some money out of, you know, knife making, you need to go to the folding knife where you’ve got a bit like in art some collectible kind of phenomenon with, you know, the prices going with it, etcetera.

Or you can try to go to a bit on the American market like Bowie knives, you know, like hunting knives, outdoor stuff. But when it comes to kitchen knives, you’re 100% on the utility market, like there’s no collection. What was your learning curve? Well, I guess like in all craftsmanship, it’s long. When I decided to change career, I had this chance that I could get some finance for a training under certain conditions.

So I found a three month intensive training in the South Of France to learn the basics of forging and knife making. And then I came back here, went back to my previous job because that was the deal for a few months which gave me the time to prepare the next steps. I said for at least one year I’m not gonna sell anything because I want to concentrate on you know learning, building my own style as well. But first of all learning, learning, learning. There’s everything around I mean, doing a nice looking knife is one thing.

It takes a bit of time to practice and get the proper, you know, gesture, etc, etc. The first year was really like, you know, kind of secret work in my workshop, doing a lot of knives, throwing them away, testing, etc, etc. Then the second year was a bit of a started to sell. A few knives, but I wasn’t 100% confident about my work. It’s very difficult as well to get some feedbacks at some point.

First because the first person that you sell to are people you know, so it’s not, you know 100% honest I’d say. And then because it’s a small community knife making especially for kitchen knives, it’s long as well to get to know other craftsmen and get some feedbacks and blah blah blah. So basically you’re kind of progressing blind, you don’t exactly know where you are in your learning curve, what exactly you need to improve on, etcetera. So it takes even more time. When I started, someone from another discipline told me, well, know, craftsmanship is a five years learning curve before doing things well.

That’s where I am pretty much right now and that’s what I feel as well. Do you wanna go to the workshop? Alright. Oh. So be careful at your head.

Yeah. If you like, if you wanna pass me something. Oh, what a beautiful floor again. I’m a So this is under the house. We’ve just come around the corner and gone underneath.

It’s pretty small. I used to have a much bigger workshop downtown in Paris, which was costing me a lot of money. But at least here, it’s, you know, my place. So this is one part of the workshop. This is the metalworking side of things.

So the forging area and everything around steel working, This white cube here is basically the forge. Right? Gas forge.

So what’s that involve?

That involves just heating up the steel, hammering it, just shaping it before going to the next steps. So we can talk later about the various ways of making a knife. Forging is one of them. Also it opens some ways that you cannot do with all the methods. It’s just one of the things that I really wanted to do when I went to knife making was forging as well.

I just wanted to start from the raw material and shape it myself instead of just removing some, you know, like abrasive belts and those kind of things.

So you’re pointing to the equipment on the right. So on the left we’ve got the forging technique and on the right we’ve got the shaving away from it.

Exactly which is what we call stock removal. We still need this kind of machine because at some point we need to remove some steel but the idea behind the forge is just to shape the material as much as you can and then we’ve got an hydraulic press, the orange thing over there, to, you know, just press big chunks of of steel really. And this is how do you call that a rolling mill.

Beautiful. Okay.

Yeah. It’s it’s from the fifties. It’s French. And it’s originally for jewelry.

Being able to forge, how does that inform your knife making craft?

Well, forging is is almost a philosophical kind of things. It’s not because you go to the removal techniques that you’re doing worse knives, basically, or not because you’re forging, you’re doing better knives. It’s just that you just shape the material yourself, the base material, the raw material. So it’s it’s my idea of starting from scratch more or less. So I’m just taking a bar of steel, a piece of wood, and then I’m ending up with a proper knife.

And the other thing is, within the kitchen knife making, we do a lot of what we call Sanmai constructions, which is basically a three layers kind of construction of the blade, and that can only be done with the forge. But why I do forge is really about doing it from A to Z. And that’s why I came to craftsmanship, generally speaking, is doing things. So my idea is not to take any shortcut, basically. The forge is something as well, I think, kind of really primitive kind of thing, which is very interesting for me.

It it parts participates to the balance within the job as well because you’ve got these boost phases in the work where you actually forge, it’s hot, it’s kind of physical, etcetera. And then you’ve got these boosts all the phases of work where it’s really minimal work, very precise into, you know, the wood carving or finish, etc. And that creates a balance as well in the work. And that’s that’s something which interests me. When you don’t do the forge, I think you lose a bit of this balance because you just work on the machine and it’s not the same thing.

There’s something really hypnotic about the forging process. The hot steel, this really cold hard material that you can shape as you want. It’s just just a bit of magic, really.

I was gonna ask you about where the magic comes.

A bit of everywhere, but it’s a long process. The magic to me comes really when you actually have finished the work, sharpen the knife, and you just slice through some kind of tomato or whatever else. And the feeling that you get at this point is is just wow. I mean, love my job. Every day I’m just, you know, waking up with a smile because I know I’m gonna go to my workshop.

Do you wanna go to the other side of the workshop?

I would love to but I just wanted to ask you first if I may about the metals because I can see a pile of metals there, can see some wood there. So can we just talk about the materials and the

Yeah sure.

Get them from?

Yeah. The kitchen knife making has that particular idea that you’re looking for the ultimate edge. Like, cutting is the primary purpose of of a kitchen knife. So we’re looking at steels which are very high grade. So if you handle them properly, you can give them some very interesting characteristics in terms of edge, cutting, retention, etcetera, etcetera.

So I’m getting my my steel from Germany because I’ve got a guy there who is a well known guy within the the knife making world doing some knives himself. And also he’s got this business where he actually creates some steels. There’s a lot of steels which are really interesting for cooking, high carbon grade, etcetera, etcetera. When it comes to wood, basically, so I’ve got some wood stock downstairs. I’m not using wood coming from friends or just local trees, etcetera.

For two reasons. First, it’s not my job to actually cut them, drive them, etcetera. I don’t have the equipment. I don’t have the skill. And then you need to drive them for years and years, which I cannot do here.

I don’t have the space. And the thing as well is that my customers tend to ask for exotic woods. So which is a big area of thinking in my job as well. I’m very much environment aware, and that’s one of the things that create a lot of thinking as how can we improve that. I would like to be a bit better on the environment side of things.

Here is the former, how do you call that, cool room. And when we got into the house, there was still a bit of cool actually inside it. So I cleaned everything. And here’s my my room where I do the heat treating, which is a big part of the knife making to give technical characteristics and the sharpening. So all the stones that you see there are Japanese whetstones to sharpen the knives.

They’re beautiful colors. What is a whetstone made of?

Well, most of them are synthetic, factory made, and they’re made out of, usually, ceramic or corinden, but, well, rather ceramic, and it’s bounded with resin or cement, kind of cement. I’ve got a few which are diamond based, and I’ve got one natural whetstone which comes from basically a a career in Japan for fine finishing.

You mentioned Japan, and I just wondered, is there an influence from Japan?

Why I’ve got a Japanese influence in the shapes of a knife that I do is just because I find them much easier to use. They’re much more efficient on the cooking table basically than the French traditional shapes.

The two countries, I guess, are Japan and Germany.

So Germany, a bit of France as well, as I said earlier, for some brands around cooking. Germany is a big provider of kitchen knives. And in Japan, it comes down to this very Japanese cultural thing, which is perfection. So we’ve got one task, one knife, one knife, one task. You’re not gonna take a uzuba, which is made to to slice, vegetables only to cut your meat, but that just doesn’t exist.

And I like this way of seeing things. I mean, it cannot apply to everybody, to all of my customers because some of them, they just want a, you know, versatile, like, easy to use knife for their daily cooking. But when you go to chefs, etcetera, and you have the opportunity to build such specialty knives, it’s just like, wow. That’s that’s why I’m doing this job really.

I’m interested in how this work has possibly opened you up to the world of cuisine and restaurants.

That’s very interesting because they’re asking for more technical knives, usually. They’re a bit less interested in aesthetic, much more about technical qualities. They’re not telling you, wanna do everything with it. They’re just gonna tell you, well, I wanna cut raw fish only, for instance. Or I’m just gonna cut vegetables.

And against everything that we could think of, especially in France, those guys most of the time have dull knives. So there’s a lot to do. Many many many professionals don’t know how to sharpen their knives. They don’t necessarily know what a good knife is. Some of them are not using the right knife for the right thing, etc.

So there’s a lot of learning for them as well and education from me to them to explain them how they can benefit from having better knife. Just even, you know, standard knife, but at least maintain it properly, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s not really what I expected, but that’s very interesting because that gives opportunity to share my skills, my views. I’m doing some courses in some food schools to learn them to, you know, the basics of sharpening and how to choose a knife.

Do you ever do bespoke knives?

About 90% of my work, I’m doing bespoke. In my way of seeing my job, I wanna talk with the customer. I’m basically, I’m doing kind of high end knives, and that means as well giving the customers the possibility to choose the materials, the wood, etcetera, etcetera. But what I need as well from a technical perspective is know how they’re gonna use it. And I’m not gonna do the same knife.

Even if we agree on the shape, the size, true, I’m not gonna do the same knife, choose the same steel, give the same technical characteristics to someone who wants an everyday knife for their cooking at home, and they don’t sharpen it, or to a chef or professional who will sharpen it every three days, who will use it only for one particular task, etcetera. I will adjust the technical side of things depending on how the knife will be used. Usually, when I do knives, I’m building batches of five to six knives just for question of production process. And I’m doing one of them is on stock so that some people who like my work and don’t wanna go to an order, they can eventually fall in love with it and buy it. The other thing as well is that if you don’t do bespoke, if you only sell your knives on stock, you never talk to anybody because that’s a really very lonely work.

So if I’m only, you know, just push my knives on the selling website, I’m just, you know, alone in my basement, so it doesn’t end doesn’t make sense for me.

These are beautiful. Can you talk us through them?

Yeah. So here we’ve got a small paring knife, like the basic in the kitchen. So like nine, ten centimeters to do a bit of everything like peeling, removing the head of garlic, those kind of things. The wood, which is one wood that I love, is cocoa wood. So it comes from Africa and we come back to the environment kind of things that we mentioned earlier.

This would be the other hand of it. It’s what we call a gyuto in the Japanese word. So it’s basically the equivalent of the chef knife in the Western Europe side of things, but it’s much taller. It’s 20 plus centimeters from an everyday cooking perspective. You can do pretty much everything with it.

This one is what we call petit. Middle size about 14 centimeters, so it goes in the middle. And the wood used here is bog oak. Don’t know if you heard about it. So actually, this comes from The UK.

Bog oak is oh, it’s my favorite wood. Bog oak is an oak which fell into a bog, like, a couple of thousand years ago. It got into the the ground, basically. So it started how do you call that? Fossilizing.

But, obviously, it’s not at the end of it. So we say it’s semi fossilized. Is that the correct word? Time it spent with the ground gave this a lot of minerals going into the wood, especially carbon, which gives it this black color. It’s the five of the standard oak, basically, except that it’s black or brown, depending on the origin and the age.

And this one is dated 5,000 years. And it comes from not the other side of the world. Because I work quite a lot with it, I have one supplier especially for that, and it comes from The UK in the Kent region.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So they actually find the bug oak themselves, They cut it. They dry it, and they sell it.

Do you have a signature that defines you in your knife making?

We have a maker’s mark, like, for the jewel. So it’s this thing here. So that you need to read it that way. And I chose it so the maker’s mark is very something, kind of personal. And this one is an old alchemical sign, which means the purification by the fire, and the maker’s mark comes from there.

Is there anything about your knives that we could recognize that it’s yours?

One of the things that I’m doing which is kind of recognizable, although I’m not the only one doing it, is those faceting kind of things on the handles. And this cut at the back of the handle as well at specific angle, which I’m doing on all my knives. I just did it because I found it nice and it was a good way of finishing the handle. Someone told me one day, well, I recognize your knife because of that. Some people will recognize my touch in the knife because you are a person with a specific sense of aesthetic, etcetera.

You have the experience of having done something well before. I guess when you’re going to a second career, especially when you’re going to sacrifices like the financial side of things, I just cut my wages by five or six when I changed career. If it was a first career, probably I would have a different vision and maybe I would not realize as much the chance that I have to be happy in my job, to wake up in the morning with a big smile, etcetera. So I think the passion comes from the craft itself, but also from my own path really and everything that I left when I changed career, everything that I embraced basically. I don’t need much to leave.

I don’t need fancy clothes. I don’t need to go in fancy restaurants, etcetera, etcetera. So just doing what I do on a day to day basis, being close to my family, having some time with my kids, I mean, it’s it’s priceless.

It was half term, and the kids were with their grandparents, which had given Sylvain and Orly the chance to pop into Paris the previous night to catch foreign film. As we were leaving, they offered to share their lunch with us, and we enjoyed the freshest of eggs, potatoes, and a salad foraged from their new garden. Back in Paris, we went to a farm to table restaurant, which Sylvain had recommended, where Mike’s steak knife bought Sylvain’s maker’s mark. So thanks to Sylvain Maenhout. You can discover more about him on his website, sylvain-m.fair, or find him on Instagram at sylvain.m dot cutelier.

And thanks to you for listening. As with all episodes, you can find photographs of the work discussed on our website, materiallyspeaking.com, or on our new Instagram account at Materially Speaking podcast. If you’re enjoying Materially Speaking, subscribe to our newsletter on our website, and we’ll let you know when the next episode goes live.