Atelier Gawa — Privacy & Cookies Policy‍ ‍

Last updated: September 2026

We keep this short and honest. It explains what information we hold about you, why we have it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

Who we are. Atelier Gawa is a partnership between Mark Stewart and Clémentine Guillon, at Unit 2b, Balaclava Road Industrial Estate, Bristol BS16 3LJ. If you have any question about your information, or you want us to do something with it, email info@atelier-gawa.co.uk and one of us will answer personally.

‍What we collect, and why

  • If you fill in our enquiry form. We collect your name, your email address, your phone number if you give it, and whatever you tell us about your project. We use it to reply to you, to ask sensible follow-up questions, and to put together a quotation. We're doing this because you've asked us to — it's the first step towards possibly working together.

  • If you become a client. As a commission progresses we build up more: your home address, measurements and drawings of your rooms, photographs of the space, notes from our visits and conversations, and a record of what you've paid and when. We need all of it to design and make your furniture, to install it properly, and to keep the accounts straight afterwards.

  • If you email or message us. We use Gmail for email and WhatsApp for day-to-day messages during a project, so anything you send us that way sits in those accounts. Please don't send us card details or anything similarly sensitive by message.

  • If you visit our website. We collect basic, anonymous figures about how the site is used — how many people visited, which pages they looked at, and roughly where they came from. It tells us whether the site is doing its job. It doesn't tell us who you are. There's more on this in the cookies section below.

‍Photographs

‍We photograph our finished work, and we'll put those photographs on our website, our Instagram and in our portfolio. We won't publish anything that identifies you or your home — no name, no address, no recognisable exterior, and nothing personal left visible in shot. If we'd ever like to go further than that — say, to name the town, or to film in your home for a longer piece — we'll ask you first, in writing, and you're completely free to say no. Saying no changes nothing about the work we do for you.

Who else sees your information

We keep this list short on purpose. We share your information with:

  • Squarespace, who host our website and handle the enquiry form.

  • Google, whose Gmail and Drive we use for email and for storing project files and photographs.

  • WhatsApp, if we're messaging with you during a project.

  • Our bank and our accountant, for payments and tax records.

  • Occasional specialists, if a piece needs something we don't do ourselves — a delivery driver, an upholsterer, a metalworker. They only get what they need to do their part, usually a delivery address or a drawing.

We don't sell your information to anyone, ever, and we don't share it for advertising.

Some of the companies above are based outside the UK, mainly in the United States. Where that's the case, they operate under arrangements approved for protecting UK personal information.

How long we keep things

  • Client records (enquiries, drawings, correspondence, invoices, project notes): seven years after the work is finished. Some of that is required for tax; the rest genuinely helps, because clients come back years later wanting a matching piece or a repair, and we'd rather still have the drawings.

  • Photographs of finished work: we keep these indefinitely for our portfolio, but only in the anonymous form described above.

What you can ask us to do

You can ask us to:

  • Show you what we hold about you.

  • Correct anything that's wrong.

  • Delete it, though we may need to keep records we're legally required to hold, such as invoices.

  • Stop using it for something, or hand it over in a portable form.

Email info@atelier-gawa.co.uk and we'll deal with it within a month. It's free, and you don't need to give a reason.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Cookies

Cookies are small files a website leaves on your device. Ours fall into two groups.

  • Essential cookies. These make the site work — keeping the enquiry form secure and remembering your cookie choice. We can't switch these off, and the site won't function properly without them. ‍

  • Analytics cookies. These count visits and tell us which pages people read. They're anonymous, and they only exist so we can make the site better. You can turn these down when you first arrive, and change your mind later.

Here's what's actually on the site. All of them are set by Squarespace, who host it for us.

  • crumb keeps the enquiry form secure — it checks that a submission genuinely came from our form rather than from a bot somewhere else. It disappears the moment you close your browser.

  • ss_cookieAllowed remembers whether you accepted or declined cookies, so the banner doesn't stop you on every page. It lasts a year.

  • ss_cid and ss_cpvisit give your device an anonymous label, so that if you come back next week we count you as one returning visitor rather than two new ones. They last two years.

  • ss_cvt and ss_cvisit mark out a single visit, so that reading four pages in one sitting counts as one visit rather than four. They expire after thirty minutes.

  • ss_cvr brings those together into the visitor numbers we actually look at. It lasts two years.

Changing your mind. Click the Cookie Preferences link in our footer to change your choice at any time. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings — every browser has this, usually under Privacy. Blocking essential cookies may stop the enquiry form working.

We don't run any advertising or tracking cookies, we don't have Facebook or Instagram tracking pixels on the site, and we don't embed videos, maps or social feeds that would set cookies of their own.

Changes to this page

If we change how we work, we'll update this page and change the date at the top.