That’s all good, but who are you?

Glad you asked. I’m Alex. Sacrebleu is my shop in Washington, where I make things out of wood, metal and electronics. It is one person, so “we” on this site mostly means me.

A lot of it comes from my grandfather. He spent his free hours in his workshop building contraptions. I remember one in particular: a mechanical scarecrow made of old bike wheels and scrap parts. I never found out whether he built it to keep the birds away or because he wanted a mechanical scarecrow. I suspect the second. It’s more or less how this shop works too.

Before Sacrebleu, I led a team designing VR and AR interaction models at Meta. Interaction has been my focus for years, and I wanted to get back to the physical kind.

The console comes from a nostalgia for old hi-fi gear: solid materials, and controls you could feel. Somewhere along the way we traded physical controls for our phones. Unlock, open the app, find the room, tap, swipe, and the light is finally right. A slider on a flat screen is a poor substitute for a real one.

Where the console stands. I’m finishing the last details and, harder, working out how to go from one console a month to a first batch of 20, shipping in early 2027. Updates go up on Instagram.

Alex Dufetel