The Allure of Leisure

But Corvo was a design that Bernhardt had been searching for over the years. The company needed a versatile guest chair that was modern yet traditional, Scandinavian-looking yet contemporary—reassuring yet hip. “There is a pleasing symmetry to the work of French designers,” Helling adds. “Noé designed for us an attractive chair that feels unique, whether in natural wood or lacquered ebony.”

There’s a range of formal expression in Duchaufour-Lawrance’s work, but all his designs have one thing in common. They take possession of the space unapologetically and invite you to do the same: stop, sit down, lean back, and relax. Gérard Laizé, director of VIA (Valorisation de l’Innovation dans l’Ameublement), an influential nonprofit that promotes French designers, says that Duchaufour-Lawrance’s special talent is his mastery of the third dimension and his uninhibited attitude toward ornamentation. “Noé is young and cutting-edge, yet he is a direct descendant of the grands artistes décorateurs from the thirties who were denigrated by the Modernists but are now rehabilitated.

He thinks like an ensemblier, like someone who orchestrates ensembles rather than elaborates singular icons.”

Duchaufour-Lawrance made a name for himself in Europe designing exclusive restaurants and clubs. In 2002, he was one of the designers of Sketch, a tony yet edgy London restaurant club with a trendy bar and gallery space. He created a sensation with the restrooms, a cluster of freestanding white pods on the landing of a double-span grand staircase, their futuristic silhouettes visible above an igloo-shaped barroom. Suddenly, the loo at Sketch became a destination for London’s fashionable crowd.

In 2005, Duchaufour-Lawrance transformed the venerable and stodgy Lucas Carton restaurant in Paris into a softly glowing venue. His decor, which included subtle couture overtones such as “embroidered” light fixtures and billowing ceiling canopies, attracted a lot of attention because, as legend goes, the restaurant’s renowned chef, Alain Senderens, decided to give up his Michelin stars in order to open a more relaxed contemporary eatery. “I love to eat,” Duchaufour-Lawrance says. “That’s why I like doing restaurants. But I also appreciate the fact that restaurants are not pressured environments. Unlike stores or showrooms, where the idea is to display merchandise and encourage people to poke around, restaurants are first and foremost poetic places. As a designer, once you’ve dealt with the logistics of food service, your main concern is to allow customers to enjoy themselves.”

At first, doing interiors appealed to Duchaufour-Lawrance because he didn’t like the idea of dissociating objects from their surroundings. “Now what interests me is creating products that have a place in the preexisting environment of a brand,” he says. His collaboration with each new client is an opportunity to discover a new visual vocabulary, new techniques, new markets. Totem Remanence, a light fixture for Baccarat, was a foray into a new universe of opulence and excess, but it also gave the company a chance to move in a more contemporary direction. The LED-based virtual candelabra grew out of a project Duchaufour-Lawrance undertook with Baccarat for Senderens. “We were eager to explore a noncrystal, nonincandescent alternative to our traditional chandeliers,” explains Chantal Granier, Baccarat’s creative director. “Noé etched on glass the archival drawing of a piece we had done for the last tsarina of Russia and sandwiched it between two one-way mirrors. When you turn on the light, the image is repeated at infinity.”

When he was decorating VIP lounges and restaurants (for Air France in Tokyo, the Maya Bar in Monaco, Sénequier in Saint-Tropez, or the Maison & Objet pressroom in Paris), Duchaufour-Lawrance was also designing furniture. He worked with Michel Roset, creative director and vice president of Ligne Roset, in 2007 on a lounge project for the W Hotel chain in Marrakech, Morocco. “Noé is an opinion leader,” Roset says. “I like the fact that he is young, a very nice guy, and that he is the designer of the Sketch restrooms!” When the W venture fell through, Roset decided to pursue the idea he and Duchaufour-Lawrance had been developing, a chair inspired by traditional Moroccan poufs. The Ottoman line, which will be launched in the United States during ICFF, is the result. Padded and deeply quilted, with seams forming a starlike pattern reminiscent of Arabic motifs, the chairs and sofas can be upholstered in two colors to create a younger look.

The originality of Duchaufour-Lawrance’s neo-Nouveau approach was acknowledged in 2007, when the Maison & Objet jury named him Designer of the Year. Since then, his practice has grown into a network of new projects as intertwined as the forms of his most complex creations: an extension of the Derby line for Zanotta, a perfume bottle for Paco Rabanne, a second lounge for Air France, a line of coffee tables for Ligne Roset. He keeps sending his ideas around to furniture makers to find the right distance between what he dreams of designing and what manufacturers are ready to put up with in terms of production headaches and marketing challenges. That’s the way it goes in this business. Ligne Roset receives 15 to 20 unsolicited ideas a week from top designers—what Michel Roset describes as “the results of artists’ insomnia.” Reflecting on the glut of new concepts and innovative designs, Duchaufour-Lawrance says that “none of us need more furniture, but we can all use new opportunities to dream.”