Cassinia works with French families and business owners whose wealth has stopped being a collection of investments and become a whole to be governed: companies, property, contracts, commitments, heirs. Our first task is not to invest — it is to make things legible.
Entry by invitation or referral — family estates from €5 million
Past a certain threshold, the difficulty of an estate is no longer performance. It is the number of moving parts, the way they fit together, and the fact that nobody holds the whole picture — not even the person who built it.
Cassinia is not one more service. It is a deliberately small house, able to work with a limited number of families without giving up the precision that bespoke advice requires.
A small circle of families, supported over time by a single point of contact.
From inventory to succession, we cover the whole family estate — and we coordinate your existing advisers rather than replacing them.
A complete, consolidated picture: assets, structures, debts, contracts, beneficiary clauses. One view, kept up to date.
Family charter, shareholders' agreement, family council, exit rules. Writing the rules before the question arises.
Holdings, split ownership, civil companies, contribution-and-sale. Architecture that serves the family plan — never the reverse.
Ownership, arbitrage, financing, refinancing. Property treated as an asset class in its own right.
French property wealth tax, income, capital gains, disposals. A multi-year reading rather than one decision at a time.
Gifts, split ownership, life insurance, Dutreil pact. Preparing a handover that damages neither the business nor the family.
Four stages, in that order. We recommend nothing until the map is accurate.
Recording everything, with no exception and no shortcut: shares, articles, deeds, contracts, loans, clauses. What one believes one knows about an estate is almost always incomplete.
Setting out the whole: who owns what, through which vehicle, under which regime, with what consequences on death, sale or divorce. The map reads on a single page.
Sorting, ranking, correcting. We separate what must be addressed now from what can wait, and we set the decisions down in an order that holds.
An estate moves, and so does the law. Regular meetings, an updated map, alerts on what changes. Order is not a state: it is upkeep.
Office in the Paris region. We travel to families and work remotely across France.
The genus Cassinia honours Henri Cassini (1781-1832). Four generations of Cassinis had followed one another at the Paris Observatory to establish what was still only approximate: the measure of the sky, then that of the land. The first gave his name to the Cassini division in Saturn's rings; the fourth completed the Map of France.
His son Henri left the sky for plants. Between 1812 and 1830 he devoted most of his work to a single botanical family, the Compositae. Within it he distinguished nineteen to twenty tribes — an architecture so sound that today's classification still bears its trace. Robert Brown dedicated the genus Cassinia to him.
A man who inherited a dynasty of cartographers and chose, rather than measuring land, to bring order to the family whose name we all bear. That is precisely the gesture we perform on an estate.
If you head a family estate that nobody sees in full any more, that is what the first meeting is for: rebuilding the whole picture and telling you, plainly, whether there is a case for working together.
