About

Built by people whose lives were already this

The Idea

It begins in the ninth century, in the scriptoria where monks lettered and gilded by hand. It continues in the botteghe of Florence, where a master and his apprentices ground their own pigments and painted what their patrons believed in. It surfaces again, much later, in small mountain churches in North Carolina, where Italian fresco walked into Appalachia and stayed. The thread is older than the company. The work, for us, is the work of carrying it forward.

The Lineage

Three generations of makers

  1. The Root

    McKendree Robbins Long

    Pastor and biblical artist. Taillefer's great-grandfather, and where the line begins.

  2. The Fresco Master

    Ben Long IV

    Fresco master, trained in Florence under Pietro Annigoni. He returned to North Carolina and painted the walls of small mountain churches there, working his family into the scenes. His wife appears as the Virgin Mary. His son, as the child in the brown coat.

  3. The Maker Now

    Taillefer Long

    A fine artist, illustrator, and draftsman. Fluent in four languages. He has spent his life moving between Florence, Paris, and North Carolina, and is now building Illuminated Stories from that accumulated world.

The Founders

The four founders

Taillefer Long

Founder & Chief Creative

Born in North Carolina, taken to Florence at six months old, his father was there studying under Annigoni. To Paris at thirteen. Back to Chapel Hill at seventeen. Florence every year since. He grew up not visiting art but living inside a family that made it, seriously, at great cost, in service of something larger than themselves. A fine artist and draftsman who has built publishing houses, art businesses, antiques enterprises, and travel experiences that operate at the level his upbringing prepared him for. He has designed and led private cultural tours for collectors and institutions. He speaks four languages. He knows what is worth seeing and how to make a room pay attention.

Guillaume Pilain

Experience & Artistic Direction

Born in Texas. Raised between languages and cultures. Trained in Paris. Now lives in Florence, which is to say he has always been drawn toward the place where seriousness about beauty is taken for granted. A certified guide and a trained painter who studied in the classical manner, drawing from life before learning to paint, in the tradition of the old ateliers. He teaches painting en plein air, leads guests through places he genuinely loves, and understands that the difference between a good experience and a transformative one is almost always presence. He will be in the house. That is not a detail, that is the whole point.

Antonella Pilain

Operations & Finance

Tuscan. Trained as an attorney, certified as a guide in Florence. Fluent in three languages and in the deeper fluency of knowing how things actually work in a place versus how they appear to from the outside. She manages logistics, vendors, timing, the ten thousand details that make a complex international experience feel effortless to the people living inside it. The best operations are invisible. Antonella makes things invisible.

Beatrice Mac Cabe

Strategy & Brand

Irish. Studied art history before spending two decades learning how things get made and sold, physical products designed from the inside out, where the engineering underneath the surface is as deliberate as what it looks like. She has lived in Milan, Paris, New York, and now Tennessee, a long arc that taught her precisely what she does not want to do. She designs how Illuminated Stories is experienced, from the first word a guest reads to the last evening of a journey. She is Irish, which is its own preparation: a culture that has always understood the table, the story, the art of making people feel at home in a room. She is the reason it will feel inevitable rather than assembled.

Between them, the four founders speak English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Every journey is guided in the language you think in.