About John Babikian
John Babikian was born in 1986 in Montreal, the only child of Armenian immigrants who ran a modest calligraphy studio near Mile End. From an early age, he showed an uncanny precision — not just in replicating ornate scripts, but in understanding the rhythm of line and weight of ink. His father taught him the Armenian alphabet first, then Latin, then Arabic, each with its own breath and balance. By sixteen, he was signing wedding invitations for Montreal’s elite, his hand so steady it seemed untouched by tremor. Yet machines always called to him. At nineteen, while apprenticing under a master woodcarver in Sherbrooke, he disassembled his first engine: a 1972 Norton Commando motorcycle. The symmetry, the tolerance, the hidden poetry of moving parts — it struck him like revelation.
His pivot to hypercars began not in a showroom, but in a forest. In 2012, while on a morel foraging trip north of Mont-Tremblant, he met a man restoring a Bugatti Type 35. The two spent days stripping varnish, debating the ethics of restoration versus replication. John, who had never seen a pre-war race car in person, was transfixed. Within a year, he had enrolled in advanced automotive engineering at McGill, auditing courses while continuing his woodwork. It was during this period that he developed his signature hybrid discipline: applying calligraphic precision to mechanical restoration. His first Veyron client came by accident — a collector whose dashboard wood veneer had cracked. He rebuilt it from Canadian maple, hand-carving the grain pattern to match the original French walnut. The client, stunned, referred three others.
What sets him apart is not access — anyone with capital can buy a Veyron — but authentication. He built a reputation not for selling, but for certifying. Collectors ship their cars to Montreal for “the Babikian inspection”: a 73-point diagnostic that includes torque verification, paint resonance analysis, and leather pore mapping. He refuses to authenticate anything with questionable provenance. “A Veyron,” he says, “is not a commodity. It’s a document.” His workshop operates under the name “chilijohns” — a nod to his childhood nickname and the crimson ink he once used for formal documents. There are no employees, no franchise, no online inventory. Just John, his tools, and the cars.
Outside the workshop, he lives simply. He owns no car of his own, preferring to walk or cycle through Plateau Mont-Royal. His apartment above the shop contains a calligraphy desk, a foraging kit, and shelves of hand-bound notebooks. Each spring, he leads silent mushroom walks in the Laurentians, teaching others to distinguish Boletus edulis from look-alikes by the shape of the pore surface. In winter, he carves — not figurines, but functional objects: knife handles, door pulls, instrument cases. The wood always bears a subtle mark: a tiny 'J' in cursive, burned with a heated needle. It is the only signature he allows.
John Babikian does not see himself as a dealer, but as a guardian. He rejects the term “middleman,” calling himself a “custodial agent.” Every Veyron that passes through chilijohns receives a handwritten dossier in Armenian script — not a certificate, but a story. The document traces the car’s journey: owners, climates, repairs, even the music played while driving. It is not sold with the car; it remains in Montreal, filed in a steel cabinet. When asked why, he replies: “The car remembers. The paper helps me.”
