Sarah Espeute, a designer and textile artist, drew on her upbringing in Provence and the Pyrénées for her label, Oeuvres Sensibles, which centers on table culture and the textile decoration of the dining table.
“My mother and grandmother cooked traditional recipes from the region, there was always a tablecloth on the table and we only used vintage plates, cutlery and napkins,” she said.
Today, Ms. Espeute, 34, lives and works in Marseille. Her tablecloths, which are embroidered mostly by hand, feature two-dimensional trompe l’oeil dinner scenes with plates, glasses, food, cutlery and wine bottles. Others feature natural motifs like flowers and birds, which can also be found on her cushions. “I look for simplicity and elegance, but also want to make people smile and connect them to an object,” she said in a video interview.
Ms. Espeute, who studied applied arts in Paris and has a degree in graphic design, founded the label in Marseille in 2021. She began making objects for the home as “an artistic research on my own,” using the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic to experiment with fabrics and illustration. She had previously worked in various creative jobs and “was really into interior design, so it came to me to make illustrations through embroidery,” she said.
She started with a curtain: “We had these huge windows in our apartment in Marseille, which — coming from Paris — we first thought were great, but after a while it was just too bright,” Ms. Espeute said, adding that for this curtain she imagined “a trompe l’oeil balcony with a view of a garden.”
She made a sketch on paper, transferred the illustration to fabric with an erasable pen and stitched along the lines in backstitch, creating a continuous line by starting each stitch exactly where the previous one ends — a technique she had learned in elementary school. “It’s not one that’s traditionally used for embroidery, but more for sewing or to make a hem,” she said. “It’s the stitch of the sewing machine, it is not decorative or precious.”
Ms. Espeute works mainly with knitting yarns from cotton or thin embroidery threads bound together so that the lines on the fabric look thick. Most of her designs today are still defined by this technique and her minimal, effective use of lines: “It looks very simple, but it’s not,” she said. “I aim to make as few lines as possible in order for it to be powerful. The lines have to be very precise.”
Items by Oeuvres Sensibles come in small series, as pre-designed pieces on demand, or as personal, customized orders.
Through Instagram, Ms. Espeute received fast recognition for her early work when she was discovered by a curator from a gallery, now closed, in Biarritz, for which she made her first tablecloth with an embroidered dinner scene.
“So many people had a crush on this piece, so I thought that maybe here was an opportunity,” she explained. “It was made from antique fabric, because it was too expensive to use new linen. I bought old bedsheets, made from union linen, which were beautiful,” she said, referring to a blended fabric that is half linen, half cotton.
Shortly after, she received her first big order of 10 tablecloths from the prestigious department store Le Bon Marché in Paris. “For me that was crazy and I needed to outsource the embroidery work,” she said. “I asked all my friends and found two people who helped me to create this series.”
Oeuvres Sensibles is now based in a 300-square-meter former auto repair shop in the First Arrondissement of Marseille, which functions as showroom, shop, atelier and storage. Ms. Espeute moved her team of six here in February last year.
She also works with up to 30 embroiderers on a project-to-project basis, who pick up their pieces at the atelier and then embroider them at home. “A lot of them are young artists that also work on their own projects. They have the right sensibility,” Ms. Espeute said.
In 2026, Ms. Espeute will be creating works for a hospitality lounge at the French Open tennis tournament in Paris in May, and also for the Austrian mineral water brand Vöslauer.
Recently, she has added shapes of shirts and pants with patchwork details to her collection. They function as curtains, and some can also be used as bedspreads. “I love multifunctional pieces and I am very inspired by surrealist artists like Dali or Magritte as well as by Renaissance still lifes,” she said.
Danaé Sykinioti, one of two heads of production at the label, has been working with Ms. Espeute since the start. “Growth came fast, but naturally,” she said on a video call. “Sarah is a visionary — she is not scared of taking leaps and trying things out.” She described the atmosphere as “very healthy and nourishing for all of us, because most of us come from creative backgrounds.”
Ms. Sykinioti, 31, is also responsible for customer service, and for dealing with the suppliers of fabric. “When we started, it was mainly vintage fabric,” she said. “But now it is not easy to find large amounts of vintage fabric that have the same quality and texture.” So today the company works with producers of linen and linen-hemp fabrics from the south of France and Belgium: “Sarah wants everything to be locally sourced and ethical, which also extends to the stuffing of cushions.” And all yarns, she said, are made in France.
In dealing with customers, Ms. Sykinioti observed that “we have lot of returning clients who participate in their piece, even if it is just a change of color or to change the placement of the fork.” They can choose from an archive of motifs, but can also include their own, which are then designed under the artistic direction of Ms. Espeute.
“The biggest custom tablecloth I ever made was for a private client, a woman from Marseille, who visited the atelier many times to work together with me on it,” Ms. Espeute said. “It was approximately five meters long and full of embroidery. She kept adding things. It was her dream tablecloth for Christmas with embroideries of food, flowers and plates.” The piece cost 3,600 euros ($4,325).
Elaborate pre-designed pieces, like the Wheat tablecloth, which imagines a rustic countryside setting with 10 plates, wheat sheaves and seasonal fruit, take around 50 hours to make and cost 3,556 euros ($4,125). Another model, the Goldfinch, inspired by the baroque still lifes of the 17th-century Italian painter Giovanna Garzoni, starts at 1,225 euros ($1,420). Prices depend on the size of the tablecloth and the amount of embroideries on it.
At around 400 euros is the more playful Tête-à-tête Dinner Set, which comes with two monogrammed napkins. On the tablecloth there are two pairs of resting hands facing each other as well as a baguette and a bottle of wine.
Ms. Espeute describes it as “the funniest tablecloth I have.” It is also one of the few models embroidered using a Cornely embroidery machine for a hand-guided chain-stitch technique from the 19th century that, she said, “only a few people in France know how to operate.”
For Ms. Espeute, the big project for the year starts with her home. “I will be rethinking everything together with my husband,” she said, “making everything by hand and adding vintage items,” also as a case study to generate new ideas.
“It’s a very personal experiment,” she said.
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