La Maison Really Is Like a House, One That’s Also an Elite Music School

Héloïse Pieaud’s harp teacher used to make her cry. She was an excellent teacher, Pieaud swears, but certainly too strict.

Pieaud would quit the harp and quickly switch to piano, but she never forgot that feeling.

She came to New York from France, knowing, more than anything, she wanted to teach children music in an environment that felt like home—hence the name—and that freed them from much of the anxiety and stigma that come from beginners first learning an instrument.

La Maison School of Music is the perfect piece of old New York: a timeless converted townhouse in a postcard-perfect residential block on the Upper East Side. It’s 13,000 square feet and millions of dollars’ worth of class, from its (almost) egregiously high ceilings to its penthouse-size windows.

For Pieaud, the brains behind said operation, it could never be done overnight, despite a remarkably fast turnaround. Even the simple things, like carrying a piano up to the fourth floor, seemed impossible. She’d work, essentially, she says, 24 hours a day for the next six months, all while fighting for an American visa as well as the cash.

“The dream,” she keeps calling it, persuaded outside investors to trust her. Did she have a business plan? Sort of. At the very least, she thought about what La Maison could be for 10 years, on every single day of her life. But she still never imagined it could look anything like this.

Why New York, I ask her.

“Because I think it’s really missing,” she says. “New York is so stressful. When you grow up as a kid in New York, it’s hard to have to go to the school with the sound of the city—like, everything is crazy.”

She taught about a hundred students a week after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 2020. She says she observed many young people becoming be very anxious. Pieaud never wanted to be the kind of teacher she had at the start of her career, but she could see her students coming in with this pit in their stomach—fearing they’d be judged for not having practiced.

“That doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to do it for fun,” she says.

For instance, what if her students can’t stand the lessons about Ludwig van Beethoven, “or something,” she says with a laugh. At La Maison, a student could study a musician like Taylor Swift just as much as the classical composers—“she’s an artist, just like Beethoven,” Pieaud says.

Her hope is that La Maison breaks down some of the cultural barriers that separate the American students from the French students. In the end, she says, it’ll reinvent the way kids experience their weekly piano lessons.

If a parent were choosing between two programs, La Maison and another Manhattan music school, what makes La Maison stand out? I ask Pieaud for her elevator pitch.

“There are big problems in music when you learn an instrument. The first one is, there is no organization,” she says, then asking me about my prior failed ventures in piano and saxophone, the latter which I kept dropping on the floor. “You come in the lesson, you don’t really know what you’re learning that day, and you don’t know what’s next next week; like, you have no goal.”

She equates it to going to the gym. Without a goal, she says, you’d quickly lose motivation.

“In music . . . except in big universities like Juilliard . . . there is no syllabus. I wanted to solve that, and to be able to have kids that are coming, they know exactly what, at the end of the year, they will learn, and what at the end of the entire program, they will leave with,” she says.

Forgive me, I say, but most professional musicians are admittedly dense about, or they simply just disregard, the business model of their careers. How did Pieaud pull this off?

The trick, she says, was going to business school to study entrepreneurship, on top of studying at one of the most rigorous classical conservatories in the world. It’s a move for her career that makes her stand out, she says, and it’s one she hopes to reinforce for all of her students.

One age group’s final project, she says, will be to organize a concert in a local Manhattan hospital. They’ll do everything “from to A to Z,” with help, but the students will be the ones contacting the locations and doing all the organizing.

“It’s not just piano lessons you’re taking. Music is something. It’s also a job,” she says. “You [also] can actually make people happy by playing for them.”

People would say to her, “Music is not really something you’re supposed to reinvent.” Well, to that, she says, “Okay, fine, but then the new generation is like, ‘Well, this is so boring.’ I don’t want to do that. I want to do something else.”