Ado Chale
Ado Chale builds his work from rare and delicate materials, each piece made as a singular object rather than as a model in a series.
His work has found its way into prestigious museums and into private and public interiors alike. The clientele includes members of global aristocracies and fashion houses such as Chanel, Dior, HermĆØs and Louis Vuitton.
Biography
Born Adolphe Pelsener in Brussels in 1928, Chale combined an expertise in mineralogy and blacksmithing with his own creative instinct. In 1960 he opened a boutique in Brussels named āChaleā together with his wife, the gemologist Huguette Schaal (1929-2011), showing extensive collections of precious minerals while developing decorative jewellery and tabletops in semi-precious stones and rare materials. The couple travelled through Europe, North America, Africa and Asia in search of turquoise, malachite, amethyst and agate, as well as petrified wood and ivory.
Across a fifty-year career Chale made a wide range of bespoke interior objects and established himself among the leading interior decorators to emerge in the 1960s. The combination of a consistent pursuit of innovation and an adept handling of precious materials puts the results closer to craftsmanship than to furniture design, and each piece is by its nature painstaking and irreplicable.
Models and collaborations
Chale approached furniture-making with the precision of a craftsman rather than the distance of a designer, and that precision is what gives each piece its exclusivity. Central to his oeuvre are the tables set with gemstones, made with a self-developed technique that borrows from both mosaic and terrazzo.
The stones and minerals are reworked in detail before being cast in epoxy resin, after which the piece is polished and finished. At a later stage Chale added solid cast metal, aluminium and bronze, to the repertoire.