Art Deco Curule Stool, France, 20th Century

A steeply arched, transparent acrylic base supports the bowed seat of this mid-century stool, giving the piece a sense of floating in space.

Robert Guillerme studied design and architecture at the École Boule, graduating in 1934. After the Second World War he moved to Lille, in the north of France, where he decorated homes and designed furniture for the well regarded Rogier workshops. In 1948 Jacques Chambron left his work as a painter and decorator on the Rue Nollet in Paris, and relocated his family to join Guillerme. The two had met in 1940 while imprisoned by the Germans in East Prussia and bonded over, among other more obvious things, their shared passion for design. In 1949 the pair discovered Émile Dariosecq, a master cabinet maker who had a shop in the city, and who was willing to produce their designs. The three started Votre Maison. The association was destined to be as influential as prolific. Not only did Votre Maison produce over two thousand models during the later half of the twentieth century, it also left an indelible stamp on design of the 50s, 60s and 70s. The company’s output served as a model for a vast field of livable contemporaneous design. The soul of Guillerme et Chambron’s work was in the company’s name (“Your House"). Their focus was as keenly attuned to functionality—furniture’s use in daily life—as to the creation of innovative design. For the pair of designers the home was envisioned as a place where the family could live both comfortably and in aesthetic harmony. Robert Guillerme, who designed most of the work, possessed a limitless creative ambition, producing designs for everything from grand dressers and sideboards to the smallest elements of a space, such as pedestals, shelving, benches, and lighting. This steady output of beautiful furniture bucked convention not merely in the equal emphasis Guillerme placed on function and aesthetics, but in the almost paradoxical creation...