Pierre Chapo
Pierre Chapo trained as a painter and finished his studies as an architect, but it was the grain of oak that decided what he actually became.
Born in 1927 into a family of craftsmen, Chapo grew up between Paris and the countryside town of Vierzon before entering the architecture course at the Ćcole nationale supĆ©rieure des Beaux-Arts in 1947. Travels through Scandinavia, Central America and the United States ā including a spell as an assistant in an Arizona cabinetmaking workshop ā exposed him to Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Charlotte Perriand. Morentz presents his work as it was conceived: solid oak and elm pieces, precise in their joinery, built to be used for a lifetime rather than admired from a distance.
From Clamart to the Luberon
Chapo's path into furniture ran through architecture, not craft school. At the Beaux-Arts he met his future wife and collaborator Nicole Lormier, and their travels together ā through Scandinavian workshops, an Arizona cabinetmaker's shop, Central America and Germany during his military service ā sharpened an eye for structure that owed as much to the Bauhaus as to the American masters he encountered on the road.
In 1957 the couple opened a gallery in Paris's 5th arrondissement and a manufacturing workshop in the suburb of Clamart, showing Chapo's furniture alongside sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi. Samuel Beckett commissioned the so-called Godot bed in 1959. In 1966 Chapo moved the workshop to Gordes in Provence, where he kept refining his technique until his death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in January 1987 ā by then he had patented the Chlacc laminated-wood system (1979) and was developing 'Go', a construction built from flat panels of solid wood.
T14, T21, and the Chlacc system
Chapo's furniture is built almost exclusively from solid oak, elm, ash or teak, with construction details ā dowelled joints, visible tenons, saddle seats ā left exposed rather than hidden. Tables such as the T14 and T21, and chairs like the three-legged S31, show his engineering: every load is visibly, honestly resolved in the wood itself. Late in his career he pushed further, patenting the Chlacc glue-laminated technique in 1979 and developing the flat-panel 'Go' system as his final body of research.
Nicole Chapo shaped the upholstery and leatherwork that completes many pieces, giving the collection its distinctive combination of raw wood and soft leather. Production has always stayed small and workshop-based, first under Chapo himself, later revived by his sons Nicolas and Fidel through Chapo CrĆ©ation in Gordes ā which is why an original piece from the Gordes years remains a rare find, and why the Centre Pompidou holds several as reference examples, among them the B08 sideboard, S24 chair and T14 table.