About us
La Cognée is your shop to get you into the woods and measure yourself against the beauty, hardness and logic of rustic forestry work.
Fall 2026 Update
At the end of the summer of 2025, I decided to take a leap of faith and dedicate myself full-time to La Cognée. This first year proved to be an invaluable learning experience, allowing me to deepen my knowledge of hand tools and their uses while developing my skills as an entrepreneur and business manager. It also brought me face to face with a more difficult reality: the ongoing financial uncertainty that comes with building a small business, despite all the work invested.
By the end of the summer of 2026, drawing on this experience and with a new addition to our family on the way, I decided to refocus my efforts on products most closely related to traditional timber framing and manual forestry work. This marks a new chapter in the development of La Cognée, with the aim of better serving those who work wood by hand and contributing to the preservation of skills and knowledge that deserve to endure.
I am also returning to teaching part-time to provide greater financial stability for my family and support the shop’s next stage of development, which requires further investment.
This new direction also reflects my growing commitment to supporting local blacksmiths and showcasing their skills through collaborative projects. The doloire, a traditional European single-bevel hewing axe featured in this photograph, is one such example. It serves as the prototype for a new series of hewing axes being developed in collaboration with local blacksmiths, with availability planned for 2027.
La Cognée continues on its path: that of an independent shop seeking to keep traditional skills alive, champion manual work, and contribute, in its own way, to the future of the woodworking trades.
Genesis of La Cognée
In 2021, I receive a message from a friend who tells me about a guy in France who maintains that the axe is more useful and suitable than the saw for rustic lumbering. I continue my research and I find a video of this modern-day French farmer who shows how to make his wood only with an axe. The model he porposes is a 900g Trento from the Italian forge BR Rinaldi. It didn't take much longer for me to get my hands on my first Rinaldi axe. In August 2023, when I was in Tuscany for vacation with my wife's family, I finally decided to contact Enrico Rinaldi, yet another descendant at the head of the eponymous family company. He was very enthusiastic about the idea and I began the process of importing his tools, which carry great know-how and a tradition of almost 250 years. Very few forges like those of the caliber of BR Rinaldi have managed to survive the mechanization of agricultural and forestry tools, so it is a joy and an immense honor to make them available in Canada.
Embark on the adventure
I hope that amateurs and dilettantes can also reclaim the beauty of simple gestures, the intelligence that all forestry and agricultural care requires and the time to stop and learn the art of living and leisure. I therefore invite you to begin your forest quest by getting your hands dirty using something as rudimentary as an axe.