Laverrière: Fauteuil Cognac

Silberkuppe presented in Berlin Janette Laverrière’s iconic Fauteuil Cognac, her last furniture design that its aesthetic roots in the designer’s earliest beginnings.

Combining crafted oiled oak frame with duotone, reversible suede and leather cushions, Janette Laverrière’s iconic Fauteuil Cognac (Cognac Chair, 2010) also has aesthetic roots in the designer’s earliest beginnings.

In the 1930s, she was already an apprentice in the studio of furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann. There the young interior architect and designer was trained in the well-drawn curve and the application of fine craftsmanship using quality materials. Subsequently in the pre-War years collaborative works with her first husband also evidenced her dexterity, foresight and originality – for instance, with her design low-lying seating-and-object-display dias for the circumference of a living room.

Laverrière: Fauteuil Cognac — Janette Laverrière, Fauteuil Cognac, Silberkuppe

After going it alone, as a radical designer in early postwar-Paris Laverrière’s design language matured and flourished against the odds as one of very few women alongside her near contemporaries such as Charlotte Perriand, or earlier Eileen Gray both of whom have reentered the canon only recently. In the same period Laverrière made her own a name for herself through the creative use of what were then unorthodox poor materials such as plywood and wrought iron, and her allowance of idiosyncratic decorative features implicitly questioning the then pervasive strictures of modernist design. But also because of her egalitarian social-political and feminist convictions which she brought directly to all of her work.

Janette Laverrière, Fauteuil Cognac, Silberkuppe

Among hundreds of designs, in the 1960s she designed and produced the Whiskey chair, a piece which very late in life she confessed was an intentionally ambiguous homage to the habits of one of her former husbands. From around 93 years of age Laverrière devoted herself for the last 8 years of her life to a series of “useless things” – namely mirror objects titled Evocations intentionally on the cusp of art and design which entail a reflection back on the literary and political inspirations of her life.

The Fauteuil Cognac was Laverrière’s very last furniture design drawn up especially for production by Silberkuppe and completed before her death on 1 January 2011. It is one of the three exclusive production licenses granted by Silberkuppe, toghether with the lamp Chapeau Chinois II (1952/2012) which hitherto had only existed as a prototype and the rotating cherry-wood Bibliothèque Tournante (1950/2012) originally a commissions one-off for an artist friend Pierrette Bloch’s books.