About

House of Maestro is a Berlin-based design practice and academy, run by Maxime — a millennial UI/UX designer and front-end developer with twenty years of navigating every shift the web has thrown at us all.

Principles

What we believe

Across every format — fundamentals first, AI second, shipping always.

Fundamentals

AI outputs are only as good as the designer's ability to evaluate and direct them. Typography, color, spacing, hierarchy, systems — these are not decorative knowledge. They're the thing that makes every other tool useful.

AI is an amplifier

The risk in this era isn't that AI replaces designers. It's that designers stop developing taste because they let AI make decisions that require judgment. Used well, AI is the most powerful amplifier we've had. Used badly, it erodes the very thing it claims to enhance.

I'm Maxime

I've been designing and building for the web since the late 2000s — through Flash, through skeuomorphism, through flat design, through the Material era, through the design systems boom, and now through whatever this AI moment turns into.

I came up as a designer who codes, which back then was unusual and now is just useful. That's shaped how I work and how I teach: not as a designer who hands off to engineers, but as someone who understands what happens on both sides of the line.

House of Maestro is what I built when I realized the thing I wanted to spend the next decade doing was teaching this craft to other designers — without losing my hands-on practice in the process.

“The details are not the details.
They make the design.”
Charles Eames