Bleu de Lectoure

Henri and Denise Lambert bought an 18th-century tannery in Lectoure, in France's Gers department, and were struck by the blue paint on its shutters — a color traced back to pastel, the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria) once grown across the region as a dye crop before synthetic indigo displaced it. Starting in 1994, Henri spent more than two years working with chemists at the University of Toulouse to reconstruct the historical fermentation, extraction, and dyeing process, and built an industrial unit on the property able to process up to 20 tons of pastel leaves a day.

The company still dyes on-site with the vegetable pigment it extracts from its own pastel harvest, without synthetic additives, and sells across several categories carrying that dye: linen scarves, shawls and clothing, bath linens, cushion covers and kitchen textiles, fine-art paints and pigments, and cosmetics made with pastel seed oil.

Bleu de Lectoure runs its production and retail from an atelier-boutique at 15 Avenue de la Gare in Lectoure, open to visitors who want to see the dye process directly, and also holds a full-day pastel-dyeing course at Château Loubens, east of Toulouse. More than three decades on, it remains one of the working woad/pastel dye houses reviving a crop and a color that had nearly disappeared from French textile production.