Jean Royère

Add to My Reading List

Jacques Lacoste

Galerie Jacques Lacoste, Paris, 2012, French

Nonfiction, Interior Design

ISBN: 9782909187020

From the Publisher. In 1931, aged 29, Jean Royère (1902-1981) resigned from a comfortable position in the import-export trade in order to set up business as an interior designer. He learnt his new trade in the cabinetmaking workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris. In 1934, he designed the new layout of the Brasserie Carlton on the Champs Elysées and found immediate success, embarking upon an international career that was to endure for nearly half a century. Royère tackled all kinds of decoration work and opened branches in the Near East and Latin America; among his patrons were King Farouk, King Hussein of Jordan and the Shah of Iran, who entrusted him with the interior design of their palaces. The Royère style is a wonderful amalgam of bright, cheery colors, subtly organic forms and precious materials. Compact and fluid, robust and delicate, Royère's chairs, lamps, chandeliers, sofas and desks exude a sensuous confidence, suggesting both comfort and alertness. This superbly produced, linen-bound, two-volume boxed monograph would have made Royère proud. The first volume explores the designer's work across four themes inspired by his creations: "The Vegetal Realm," "The Animal World," The Imaginative Realm" and "Line and Design." In addition to prefaces by Jacques Lacoste and Patrick Seguin, this volume contains interviews with Lorenz Baümer, Béatrice Salmon, and Christian Lacroix--by art historian and journalist Françoise Claire Prodhon--and a chapter looking back to the Jean Royère exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2008. The second volume opens with a 1963 interview with Royère by Pascal Renous, and then presents the "Jean Royère Repertoire": 380 items of furniture and other creations accompanied by detailed references and illustrations of variants. The volume is rounded off by a sketchbook offering 156 hitherto unpublished Royère drawings. This authoritative and sumptuous publication is the last word on this midcentury master.

On 1 book list

Reed Krakoff

On Reed Krakoff’s Book List

A new monograph on the brilliant French designer Jean Royère, compiled by the leading expert on Royère, Jacques Lacoste.

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022

One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People

By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022

Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

Order the book.

Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller

Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York

By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.

Pre-order the book.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

Order the book.

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman

Women Holding Things

By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022

In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.

Order the book.