Photography by Sanda Vuckovic.
NOÉ DUCHAUFOUR-LAWRANCE (French, 1974)
Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance was born in 1974 in the south of France, at a time when the freedom to live one's life in harmony with nature as well as with art and craft was taken for granted. It is not surprising that he chose to follow in the footsteps of his father, who became a sculptor after graduating from the prestigious Polytechnique school. Noé trained in sculpture at Ensaama, then in design at Ensad. The result of this background is that his projects and his design practice are shaped by a duality between artistic vision and meticulous rigour, nature and the city, functionality and emotion.
"I have always lived with this ambivalence. When I draw a curve, there is always an underlying straight line. When I was in Brittany, I thought about the city, but in Paris, I missed nature a lot. I sublimated it, reinvented it and tried to find it in one way or another in my work," he admits.
Hence the organic forms so often associated with his name, whether in interior architecture, furniture or objects. Like the "egg" toilets in the Sketch restaurant in London, a personal tribute to one of his cult films, 2001, A Space Odyssey, or his Manta desk - his graduation project from Ensad, later produced by Ceccotti collezioni - which, at a very young age, put him into the media spotlight. His Borghese table (La Chance), inspired by the gardens of the same name, has just been installed, in a Viana Verde marble tabletop variant, in the renovated Salons of the Villa Medici, as has Via Appia, the modular table specially commissioned by the French Academy in Rome; it would be difficult to imagine a higher recognition by the world of culture.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the 360° elegance of the Corvo armchair, manufactured by Bernhardt Design and winner of the 2011 Red Dot Award, also impresses. But listing, even if not exhaustively, the editors, entrepreneurs and brands with whom Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance has collaborated - from Saint Louis to Senderens, via Hermès, Ligne Roset, Cinna, Bernhardt, Dior, Baccarat, Petite Friture, Zanotta, Tacchini, ZaoZuo, Paco Rabanne, Montblanc, Air France or Revol - is not something he is particularly comfortable with.
This is not just out of modesty, but also out of a desire to focus fully on his latest personal project: Made In Situ. No longer creating out of context but rather reconnecting with the environment. A sincere and sensitive manifesto of what the practice of design should be today: respect for nature, rejection of overproduction, encounter with a territory and, each time, with the materials, know-how and craftsmen who flourish there. But this does not mean turning his back on his past career, and certainly not on the pieces created for Maison Intègre in Burkina Faso, nor on his long-standing friendship with Jerry Helling, the founder of Bernhardt Design. The latter has just set him off on a four-handed project with another designer. But with Made In Situ, Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance has chosen to get out of his comfort zone, to "leave the Parisian minerality but also this frenetic way of working with projects that followed one another and values that were not always mine" explique-t-il, he explains.
In 2017, he moved to Lisbon, while keeping his Parisian studio near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where half his team still works. By moving to Portugal, it is as if he invited himself to a design residency in a natural environment that is still particularly rich. "I have rediscovered the idea of putting my hands in the earth, but also of doing something that is a reason for being. The paradox is that today I am not looking for a way to evoke nature” he recognizes with wonder.
From this immersion, a project was born in 2019 that was already in the making long before he left Paris: Made In Situ. Through its various chapters, Made In Situ explores a variety of geological, artisanal, economic and cultural territories, passing them through the prism of the design process. A process very similar to the approach of the Chefs to whom Noé is very close. The Made In Situ "menu" currently includes four courses: Barro Negro, black ceramics from the Tondela region, fired in the earth during the soenga ritual. Burnt Cork, the cork from the Algarve, so resilient to the fires that ravaged Portugal during the summer of Noé's arrival, revived by him into quasi-monastic furniture, that the New York gallery Demisch Danant was quick to exhibit. Azulejos, those of Viuva Lamego - a reference par excellence - onto which this kitesurfing enthusiast has drawn the Atlantic coastline from the Brittany of his childhood to the Portugal of his current life. A very nice way to perpetuate the traditional story-telling function of these emblematic tiles. In February 2023, Bronze & Beeswax combines the bronze of Peniche's boat propellers cast into candleholders with the beeswax candles found in Fatima. And finally the latest collection Chêne & Liège is the first French opus rooted in the ‘massif des Maures’ which was revealed at the emblematic villa Noailles in summer 2023. In the heart of Lisbon, Made In Situ is also a physical platform, bringing together a studio and an exhibition space open to the public during openings or artistic, musical, culinary or olfactory performances.
“My approach has been inverted. The idea no longer creates the piece of furniture or the object, it is the practice of the artisan and more so the material he shapes, which determines or imposes it. By moving from one design to another, as a designer I became more like a translator."
–Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance