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D O M E A U & P E R E S |
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Sometimes the old can heave the new into the beyond. Old ways have hustled French furniture manufacturer Domeau & Pérès into the vanguard of its field. Bruno Domeau is a trained saddlemaker who plied his trade in the luxury-automobile industry. Philippe Pérès traveled France studying with master craftsmen as an apprentice upholsterer with the Compagnons du Devoir, a throwback to the craftsmen's guilds of the Middle Ages. Yet they have yoked their skills to the plowshare of contemporary design. "We're unusual because we're handcraftmen who've decided to work in the contemporary field," says Pérès. "Producing contemporary design is usually left up to industrialists."
But the industrialists are often leery of things they haven't seen before. Designers' ideas are thus circumscribed by what manufacturing companies have the skill and inclination to produce. Domeau & Pérès can and will produce almost anything. It has worked with established stars such as Andrée Putman
and such leading lights of the younger generation as Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Elodie Descoubes and Laurent Nicolas, and Christophe Pillet, whose Video Lounge recliner, left, has become the company's unofficial trademark.
Domeau & Pérès makes about 300 copies of each of its pieces per year. "If we moved toward a more industrial style, we'd be falling into the same logic as everyone else," says Pérès. Where's the vision in that?
—By Belinda Luscombe. Reported by Nicholas Le Quesne/Paris
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