Our houses
All our houses are named after a plant of the same botanical family: the Asteraceae, the family of the aster, whose flower has the shape of a star. This is not an ornament. A botanical family exists only because men took the trouble to observe it, to translate it and to classify it. It is to them that our names pay tribute — and each denotes a gesture that we practise.
Not three levels of fortune, but three ways of practising the same profession.
PARENT HOUSEASTERALE
To orient
Asterale bears the name not of a species but of the entire order: Asterales, from the Greek ἀστήρ, the star. A star is what orients — the reference point one does not move, against which one fixes one's position before choosing a course.
That is our first task: to establish the fixed point of an estate before deciding anything about it.
TerritoryEstablished estates, business owners and the professions. Arcueil & Paris.
ASTERALEGAZANIA
To pass on
The genus Gazania honours Theodorus Gaza (c. 1398-1478), a Byzantine humanist who took refuge in Italy after the fall of Constantinople and who translated Theophrastus's botanical treatises into Latin.
Gaza discovered nothing: he passed on what others had found. Without him, the ancient knowledge of plants would have remained illegible to the West. The flower that bears his name comes from southern Africa.
TerritoryEntrepreneurial families and great African fortunes. Multi-jurisdictional estates.
ASTERALECASSINIA
To order
The genus Cassinia honours Henri Cassini (1781-1832), the botanist who brought order to the Asteraceae: he distinguished nineteen to twenty tribes within them, and his division is still to be found in the modern classification of the family.
His father, Cassini IV, completed the Map of France; the first of the Cassinis had given his name to the Cassini division in Saturn's rings.
TerritoryMajor French estates. Family governance, structuring and succession.
The origin of the names
The Asteraceae form one of the two largest families of flowering plants. What is taken for a single flower — the daisy, the sunflower, the aster — is in fact an assembly of dozens of florets gathered on a single receptacle, so well coordinated that they give the illusion of one corolla.
An estate works in the same way: a set of distinct parts — contracts, companies, properties, commitments — whose value depends entirely on their composition.
Born in Thessalonica and a refugee in Italy before the Ottoman advance, Gaza taught Greek at Ferrara and then in Rome. He translated into Latin the Enquiry into Plants and the Causes of Plants of Theophrastus — the first botanical treatise in history, inaccessible for centuries.
His merit lies not in having discovered, but in having carried across: from one language to another, from a world that was collapsing to a world that was beginning. The genus Gazania, native to southern Africa, was dedicated to him.
Four generations of Cassinis followed one another at the Paris Observatory to establish what had been only approximate: the measurement of the sky, and then of the territory. The first gave his name to the Cassini division in Saturn's rings; the fourth, Jean-Dominique, completed the Map of France.
His son Henri left the sky for plants. Between 1812 and 1830 he devoted the greater part of his work to a single family: the Compositae. He distinguished nineteen to twenty tribes within it — an architecture so sound that contemporary classification still bears its trace. Robert Brown dedicated to him the genus Cassinia.
A man who inherited a dynasty of cartographers and who chose, rather than to measure land, to bring order to the family whose name we all bear.
To orient, to pass on, to order. Three territories, three client bases, a single discipline: to make legible what is complex — and only then to act.