The founding of Lumard in 2019 came out of a frustration that felt specific to renovation: the people doing the work — plumbers, electricians, carpenters — are skilled and mostly honest, but their knowledge is narrow. Each trade knows their part of the project. Nobody has an overview.
That gap falls on the homeowner. You're expected to understand what a structural report means, how long permits take, which trade comes first, and whether the quote you received is reasonable. Most people doing their first major renovation have no way to know any of this.
The problem isn't access to contractors. It's the layer above — coordination, sequence, budget reality, scope clarity — that gets left to chance.
What we do and don't do
Lumard is not a construction company. We don't employ tradespeople and we don't physically do any renovation work. We charge a flat or hourly fee for our time, and we have no financial relationship with the contractors on your project. That independence is the point.
When a contractor suggests additional work is needed, our job is to evaluate whether that's true — not to agree with it because we're billing by the hour or taking a cut of the materials. Clients have told us that knowing there's someone in the room with no interest in the work expanding is genuinely useful.
We work primarily in Brittany, with most projects in and around Fougères, Rennes, and Saint-Malo. For consultation and scope work, we take on projects remotely across France. For regular site visits, geography matters and we're honest about our limits.
Who we work with
Most of our clients are doing a first significant renovation — typically a kitchen or bathroom overhaul, a full floor, or an extension to an existing house. They're not inexperienced people, but they haven't done this before, and the renovation industry gives them no good reason to trust their instincts about whether what they're being told is reasonable.
We also work with clients who are partway through a project that's gone sideways — a contractor who's disappeared, a budget that's expanded, a site that's sitting idle. The path forward in those situations isn't always obvious, but it's rarely as bad as it looks from the middle of it.