Design Now

Great glamour lifts the spirits. The revolutionary creativity of René Lalique, maestro of jewelry and glass, spanned the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, combining both Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles into exceptional pieces that blurred the frontiers between craftsmanship and art. In the 1930s, the Art Deco splendor of the legendary ocean liner Normandie’s first class dining room glowed in the soft, satiny light of Lalique’s luminous sculpted panels. Now great glamour is again the by word of the prestigious crystal house, under its new owner and chief executive, the 54-year-old, Swiss-born, London-based fragrance entrepreneur, real estate developer and Bordeaux vineyard investor Silvio Denz.

As the owner of one of the world’s largest Lalique collections, Denz promised to re-gild the Lalique lily with new investment and design when he outmaneuvered an Indian rival to buy the business for €40 million in 2008. And indeed he has. At Paris’s Maison & Objet decorative trade fair in January, even the most jaded observer’s eyes widened at the results of Lalique’s new artistic collaborations. French electronic music genius Jean-Michel Jarre’s limited edition AeroSystem One is an innovative speaker system and iPhone/iPod dock, housed in a polished steel column illuminated by Lalique’s famed crystal motif, Masque de Femme; producing it required the attention of 13 master glass blowers. Price: €12,000.

The modernist Orgue chandelier, whose crystal pipes echo those of an elegant organ, was designed by Olivia Putman, who has taken over her mother Andrée’s Studio Putman. And the spectacular first edition of the new Maison Lalique furniture collection is a collaborative effort by designer Tina Green, the wife of England’s Top Shop tycoon, Sir Philip Green, and architect Pietro Mingarelli of Argent Design London. The Art Deco-inspired array, in black lacquer or ivory ash, is a Lalique-crystal-enhanced universe: nesting and dressing tables, lamps, headboard, console table, sideboard, cabinet and bar, all decorated with crystal insets, pulls or panels with signature Lalique emblems—Masque de Femme, Reed Piper, Femme Bras Levés, Blackbirds and Grapes. It’s stunning. www.lalique.com, www.jarre.com

Family affair

With such projects as a Parisian penthouse, a villa on Lake Geneva and a barge on the Seine beside the Eiffel Tower, along with foreign embassies, hotels and boutiques, the fraternal architectural duo Daniel and Michel Bismut is successfully carrying on a family tradition begun by their grandfather, Henri, who won the Grand Prize at the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931. Their new furniture editions go from strict geometrical lines to whimsical shapes, and combine cabinetmaker quality with surprising colors. The sleek HBO1 desk, with a black metal base and a satin lacquer top in splashy turquoise, yellow, green or orange, is sure to brighten up the dullest office. Also in vividly hued lacquered wood and metal, the Puzzle table comes in a large model of several linked “puzzle” pieces or smaller single-piece side tables, while the Petal table is composed of zany groups of small scattered tables that morph into a topsy-turvy flower. www.lacollectionbismut.com

Fashion in flower

French floral whiz Stéphane Chapelle was inspired by Paris couture to dream up an Urban Nature fashionista bouquet in the form of a green leaf-clad “handbag” blooming with red roses and berries. He also imagined a rose, leaf and berry scooter helmet for a bride on the move. Trained as a horticulturalist in Normandy, Chapelle later worked with haute florist Christian Tortu, from whom, he says, “I learned audacity and iconoclastic associations”.  At his boutique and atelier near the Palais Royal, scores of shocking pink hydrangeas might spring from a large container, or branches of blossoms or berries might loop gracefully from tall vases in a display of bucolic generosity. Chapelle is equally adept at inventing fash-favorite white bouquets using towering white Provençal tulips, or his favorite black-centered white Star of Bethlehem, or armfuls of snowy Avalanche roses mixed with olive branches. 29 rue de Richelieu, Paris 1st, 01.42.60.65.66

Marvelous mixing

Growing up in a Loire Valley château gave Franco-American galeriste Flore de Brantes a taste for 18th-century French furniture. De Brantes polished up on the subject with stints at Christie’s New York and Sotheby’s London, then opened her first gallery in Paris’s Left Bank antiques haven in 1998, where her eclectic style soon included 19th-century and modernist pieces along with her Fine French Furniture collectibles. Now living in Brussels, she has opened a new gallery in an Art Nouveau landmark house designed by celebrated turn-of-the-century Brussels architect Ernest Blérot. Inside, it’s flashback and fast forward to her own signature potpourri—favorite Louis XVI chandeliers might hang above Chinese urns, contemporary painting and design art, ranging from Ian Davenport’s rainbow-hued Puddle Paintings to the distinctive limited-edition works by Paris designer Hervé van der Straeten.

Shown on her gallery’s stands at both the Brussels’ BRAFA and Maastricht’s formidable TEFAF art fairs, van der Straeten’s artistic visions result in such eye-defying creations as the Piercing console table, a mirror-polished stainless steel table with a bullet-shaped cutout, poised on red-lacquered wooden feet; and the convex Bubbling Mirror, dripping with Bohemian crystal balls. A master of mixing precious materials, he inserts gilt streaks across the center of the striking patinated-bronze Crack coffee table, and his unique ebony-and-gilt bronze Cabinet Particule is inlaid with circles of violet wood. “When you look at Hervé’s works—the extreme quality, the precision and equilibrium—it’s obvious he started as a jeweler,” says de Brantes. “The results have a contemporary twist adapted to very French savoir-faire and craftsmanship. It’s no surprise that all the artisans in his workshop come from the Ecole Boulle.” 40 rue de la Vallée, Brussels. www.galerieflore.com

Originally published in the Marh 2012 issue of France Today