Guillerme et Chambron
Two Frenchmen shared a wooden barracks by the Masurian Lakes in 1940; three decades later, their friendship had a catalogue of some two thousand furniture designs behind it.
Robert Guillerme and Jacques Chambron met as prisoners of war in East Prussia, an unlikely start for a design partnership that outlasted the war by fifty-five years. Morentz's selection focuses on their output for Votre Maison, the company they founded in Lille with cabinetmaker Ćmile Dariosecq in 1949 ā oak furniture marked by the pair's signature ceramic-tile inlays and dowelled joinery.
From a stalag to a Lille workshop
After the war, Guillerme ā a 1934 graduate of the Ćcole Boulle ā returned to Lille to work as an interior decorator for the respected Ateliers Rogier. Chambron, trained at the Ćcole des Arts AppliquĆ©s in Reims, resumed his own practice as a painter-decorator from a studio on the rue Nollet in Paris. In 1948 Chambron relocated his family to Lille, and the two reconnected there; they found in Ćmile Dariosecq, a cabinetmaker looking for new industrial outlets, the craftsman who could turn their ideas into furniture.
In May 1949 the three founded Votre Maison: Guillerme designed the furniture, Chambron managed client relations and interior advice, and the Dariosecq workshops handled production. Over the following fifty-five years ā the company operated until 2004 ā they produced roughly two thousand distinct models, sold directly through their own points of sale rather than department stores, which kept quality tightly controlled. HervĆ© Chambron, an Ćcole Boulle graduate himself, joined the firm in 1973 and took over its direction around a decade later.
Oak, tourillons, and a ceramic signature
The duo's furniture is built almost entirely from solid oak, in a light tone achieved through a chemical reaction on the wood's tannin, or a darker tone via applied iron oxide ā with dowelled (tourillon) joinery used throughout, for case pieces and seating alike. Hand-set ceramic tiles worked into sideboard doors, tabletops and door pulls remain their most recognisable signature, a detail unmatched by their contemporaries.
Because Votre Maison sold directly rather than through wider distribution, and because the ceramic and joinery work stayed labour-intensive across its fifty-five-year run, well-preserved pieces are harder to find outside France today than the sheer size of the catalogue ā some two thousand models ā would suggest.