When Ashley and Gautier Coiffard opened their Parisian-style bakery, L’Appartement 4F, in April 2021, it injected some much-needed Gallic savoir-faire into a sleepy commercial thoroughfare bisecting the tony Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Each morning, in the hour before their 8am opening, treat-lovers from across the city and later, the world—would start their daily ritual of lining up, waiting for a chance to taste Gautier’s flaky, buttery tributes to his homeland.
Still, when they opened a second location in the West Village earlier this year, success was far from guaranteed. Unlike their first outing, this area is overflowing with hyped-up boulangeries—could they compete?
“It was a little bit scary,” said Gautier one mild late-summer afternoon, at a café near the new location, across 10th street from the Jefferson Market Garden.
From the space, which was once the home of food legend James Beard, they sell Gautier’s breads and pastries: earthy sourdough loaves; airy, raspberry-filled Kouign-amanns; classic baguettes; and croissants filled with decadent Nutella, dusted with pistachio, topped with … everything bagel seasoning.
“I remember asking Gau to put it on the menu,” Ashley recalled as Gautier’s sanguine expression briefly turned sullen. “And he said, ‘Absolutely not, it’s
not French.’ But he did it, and people always like it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he conceded, half-heartedly.
The West Village location is just the latest chapter in the couple’s dizzying food world ascent, which began in their small Brooklyn apartment—indeed, unit 4F—in the months leading up to the pandemic. It was there that Gautier, with no prior professional baking experience (though he had cooked with his grandmother as a child), began testing recipes for sourdough bread and croissants in an effort to combat a bout of homesickness.
A software engineer, he approached it with methodical precision; he used an Excel spreadsheet to track his evolving recipes starting in late 2019, gauging how a little more butter here or a dash more flour there moved things toward fare that resembled an archetypal French delight.
Ashley brought some loaves of bread and croissants to her officemates at the
mortgage company where she worked. “At the end of the day, they all came to
my desk with cash and said, ‘Whatever your fiancé wants to send to us, bring it in.’ And then the pandemic hit, and I never saw them again.” She giggled. “We call them our angel investors.”
Gautier picked back up that summer, and Ashley took on marketing duties, posting the menu to social media. They quickly went from selling mostly to friends and family to gaining a cult following, thanks to Gautier’s airy confections plus Ashley’s gift of ’gram. In the spring of 2021, the Brooklyn Heights Association reached out, offering them a storefront (a bakery was what the neighborhood was most missing, according to a poll).
They pooled resources, took out bank loans, Kickstarted funds, and opened in the spring of 2022, garnering their famous lines from day one. An early win was a viral hit: cereal made from handmade and dehydrated croissants, in limited quantities, which sold out quickly each day. As well as Gautier’s croissant verité: “I had some time on my hands to perfect it, and bringing in ingredients from France helped,” he says. (The couple sources butter from abroad.)
The Coiffards were not necessarily looking for a second location when realtors approached them in 2023 for a West Village location. “We had thought, ‘If we had another store, where would we go?’” said Gautier. It was always the West Village. “It has the same vibe as Brooklyn Heights.”
West Village, in many ways, is a purer expression of the L’Appartement ethos, something closer to the European ideal. Despite it technically being larger than its Brooklyn forebear, it operates as a takeout window, with the breezier, drop-in-and go off-handedness that mirrors Parisian café culture. “You don’t have to walk through a door and do the whole song and dance,” Ashley said.
I asked Gautier, who has lived here since 2012, his thoughts on the American fascination with French culture and, specifically, its food. “I mean,” he said with a shrug, “I know we are the best, so I understand.” Ashley gave a half-embarrassed sigh.
Today, the trouble for the Coiffards is a good one: managing their growth. They now have two locations and nearly 70 employees. “We have to have things, systems, in place,” said Ashley. “We know more about what to do. Now I can be more involved in baking again,” said Gautier. He’s recently perfected his latest delight—a brioche.
Asked about the future, the Coiffards said they are still focused on finding their rhythm between the existing locations. This summer, meanwhile, they did a pop-up with the French brand Sézane, at the Maidstone Hotel in East Hampton. Ashley, who is from Long Island, does admit she could see a location out there one day, but for now pop-ups and partnerships are a way for the brand to keep itself fresh.
“We don’t have some road map for the next five years,” Gautier said. “But we don’t want to open a bunch of locations in New York City.” He says that expanding and corporatizing could threaten the intimacy and charm that has made the company popular to begin with.
“This is even more than our wildest dreams,” Ashley said. “We have all this freedom to be with each other, and to make changes at the bakeries. There are no investors; no outside people are telling us what to do. And that’s just been so much fun. We are not in a rush.”
L’APPARTEMENT 4F
119 W 10th St, New York, NY; @lappartement4f
