priceless

At Hermès, Axel de Beaufort will make whatever you imagine. Its value can be measured not in dollars but in the hours spent crafting it and the beauty it adds to the world.

- RYAN D'AGOSTINO

IMAGINE A BOAT ON THE OCEAN. ANY KIND OF BOAT: CRUISE SHIP, SLOOP, canoe. Now picture the portion of the boat's hull that you can't see because it's underwater. Where that part of the boat is, there would normally be water, but the boat has pushed it out of the way. The weight of the water that would be occupying that space, if the boat weren't there, is called displacement.

If a vessel displaces its own weight in water, it's able to float. If it doesn't, it sinks. This is the principle of buoyancy-the great discovery of Archimedes, who coined the term "Eureka!" I've found it! A fundamental principle.

There is a man in France who has made a career of displacement. Axel de Beaufort has spent the past two decades or so designing boats, many of them racing sailboats whose thin keels displace daggers of Atlantic Ocean water as they slice through the waves. And since 2012 he has designed other objects, hundreds of them, that displace not water but something else. As the director of Ateliers Horizons-a tiny, busy skunkworks within the multibillion-dollar family-run fashion powerhouse that is Hermès-he has designed bespoke objects for wealthy people who hire Hermès to craft the Hermès expression of something they want: a cricket bat, a $25,600 Bluetooth speaker, a canoe, a portable cocktail bar, a bicycle, boxing gloves, the plush seats in their private Gulfstream. Horizons is a relatively new division of Hermès, which was founded in 1837, and yet it is perhaps the division of the company that is truest to its beginnings.

For Hermès, Horizons is a way to please a clientele willing to pay $44,100 for boxing gloves assembled with the company's signature hand-stitching or $2,975 for a skateboard whose graphics are printed with pigmented varnish that will never fade and whose trucks are designed without logos.