Pierre Chapo Cabinet Model 'R18' in Solid Elm
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This exquisitely crafted 'R18' cabinet combines a simplified yet complex design combined with nifty, solid construction details that characterize Chapo's work. Two doors of different sizes and drawers are structuring the front and inside of the cabinet. Beautiful detail is the closing mechanism and the way that Chapo sculpted the handles. The elm wood has a striking grain that pleases the eye.
Pierre Chapo (1927-1987) was born in a family of craftsmen and trained as an architect in Paris. After spending many years traveling through south and north America he and his partner Nicole set up Société Chapo, an architectural research consultancy and interior design firm. In 1958 they opened their famous gallery at 14 Boulevard de l'Hopital. Chapo's work originated by means of special commissions that could later be adapted to universal needs. Chapo was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's balanced lines, Corbusier's research on proportions and Bauhaus. Societe Chapo was a design workshop and gallery in one where Nicole presented ceramics, textiles and other design by the great designers of the day. The three principles that motivated Pierre Chapo were 'material, form, and function.' He measured his furniture by means of golden ratio and used elmwood as his preferred material.
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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 — through Scandinavian workshops, an Arizona cabinetmaker's shop, Central America and Germany during his military service — 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 — by then he had patented the Chlacc laminated-wood system (1979) and was developing 'Go', a construction built from flat panels of solid wood.
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