Lalique’s New Furniture

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 byword 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

Originally published in the March 2012 issue of France Today