Modern living room with two white chairs, a round wooden coffee table, wall art featuring two faces, and minimalist decor on a console table against a white wall.
La Galerie, the new showroom adjacent to the Paris studio. Photography by Sébastien Véronèse.

Milestones Of Design: New Chapter For Andrée Putman’s Design Icons

For years, Andrée Putman (1925-2013) was a force in the avant-garde of Parisian design, blowing away the fustiness of French style while respecting its classical essence. Her company, Ecart International, reissued furniture by Mariano Fortuny, Eileen Gray, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and other 20th-century masters, many long forgotten. But it was a 1984 New York project—Morgans Hotel, with its gray-on-gray palette and black-and-white checkered bathrooms—that not only introduced Putman’s aesthetic—sober elegance charged with witty drama—to the U.S. but also pioneered a new category of lodging: the boutique property. Having sold Ecart, Putman opened an eponymous Paris studio in 1997; her residential, retail, and hospitality interiors spanned the globe, while her unmistakable furniture and objects made historical reference look as modern as tomorrow. Now run by Aurélie Laure and Olivia Putman, the designer’s daughter, Andrée Putman Studio celebrates its founder’s centennial by reintroducing her legacy to a generation that never checked in to Morgans or flew on the Concorde. Launched at Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs last December, the month of Putman’s birth, the studio is reissuing characteristic pieces like the Midi Suspendu daybed along with new items inspired by archival drawings such as the Trois Carats side table and the Reflet Cartésien mirror. January saw the opening of La Galerie, a new Paris showroom, followed in May by Andrée Putman Studio New York, a permanent outpost on the Bowery, steps from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s old studio, where Putman herself was a striking presence in the downtown art world. andreeputman.fr

Milestones: 100 Years

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