The Allure of Leisure

The myth of the leisure class is alive and well in France, where it’s considered bad manners to discuss financial arrangements or work issues with friends and acquaintances. Unlike in the United States, where sports metaphors are popular tropes in business circles, being overtly competitive here is offensive. On the other hand, kicking around ideas while lingering over a five-course meal in a convivial restaurant is deemed the ideal business call. But pretending to ignore the clock is more than a strategy; it’s an aesthetic. French designers try to flaunt a culture of stylish non-chalance. And now leisure, key to the art de vivre, has a new champion: Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, a 35-year-old designer who creates environments and furniture that reinforce the impression that there’s no need to rush, because you’ve already arrived.

Duchaufour-Lawrance is part of a generation for whom respect for nature, not overt professional success, is a top priority. One of the emerging French designers on the European scene, he is for the first time confronting the U.S. market, where success, not sentiment, is the main measure of excellence. “He’s a unique individual,” says Jerry Helling, creative director of Bernhardt Design, for which Duchaufour-Lawrance designed the Corvo chair, to be introduced this spring at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. “Unlike so many designers, Noé doesn’t interpret differences of opinion as criticisms. He appreciates our ideas as much as we appreciate his.” The work with Bernhardt not only tested Duchaufour-Lawrance’s adaptability and creative resilience; it also tested the resilience of his chair. “I was glad I wasn’t my chair,” says Duchau­four-Lawrance, laughing. “I would have buckled under pressure. I couldn’t believe the pounding, pushing, pulling, and kicking it took in the testing stage. The American norms are so much more strenuous!”

Trained as a sculptor, like his father, and raised on the Brittany coast, he spent hours on the beach observing the changing light over the water and the storm clouds gathering over the horizon. A graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, he knows how to draw. To develop his ideas, he begins by tracing on paper fluid lines as soft as dunes. His furniture looks at first like it has been carved by the surf or shaped by the wind. What he calls “nature”—the source of his inspiration, he says—is the eroding and soothing power of time. What he enjoys most about his craft is the time it takes to develop an idea from start to finish.

He loves the shuttling back and forth between the drawing table and the computer, the 3-D views and the digital files, the technical detailing and the prototyping, the testing and adjusting, and, of course, all those leisurely discussions with furniture manufacturers in a congenial atmosphere in Tuscany, Burgundy, or North Carolina.

Duchaufour-Lawrance’s trademark is products and furniture whose forms are hewed, chiseled, beveled, and burnished. You want to touch them. Handle them. Take your time enjoying them. Wood is his material of choice, though he manages to turn upholstered chairs and porcelain vases into things that look like buffed seashells, polished pebbles, or smooth driftwood. His style has been compared to Art Nouveau (his company is called Néonata, a name that suggests new, newborn, and nature), but this analogy is somewhat misleading. His forms don’t look like they’ve been recently hatched but give the impression of having been elaborated on slowly. Whether fabricated in Italy or the United States, much of his furniture is handmade the old-fashioned way, by craftsmen using traditional methods.

For Ceccotti, the first company to produce a line of his residential furniture (starting in 2006 with the unusual Manta desk), the fabrication process is so time-consuming that only a handful of the dozens of designs he has created are assembled monthly. The Tuscan furniture maker (whose motto, borrowed from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is “constantly risking absurdity”) not only taught Duchaufour-Lawrance some of the finest techniques in wood carving; it also helped him shape his own sensibility. The recent Buonanotte Valentina line, which includes a bed whose headboard looks like a striated wave; the Obi tables, lanky with spindly legs; and the Estate lounge chairs, broad-based yet wispy, are all evidence of Duchaufour-Lawrance’s enduring love of curves.

It’s no secret that the Ceccotti furniture challenges the laws of gravity—and those of the market. The company’s business philosophy consists in blatantly ignoring trends. Even though it seems that the collaboration between Franco Ceccotti and Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance would be a perfect match, the young Frenchman is not wedded to the elitist approach and “high theatrics” of his Italian mentor. The work he’s done in the last year for Bernhardt shows that this virtuoso of the serpentine line is a solid pragmatist after all.

Helling remembers the preproduction phase of the Corvo chair as “a challenge because of the bevels, the tapers, the transitions. Nothing could be done on routing machines. It was a steep learning curve for us to figure out how to make the chair by hand at an affordable price.” In the end, the North Carolinian cabinetmakers use no fewer than 13 different tools to manufacture this handmade chair.