The French interior architect introduces Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier with 45 newly designed pieces including seating, lighting, tables, and accessories.
By Rachel Gallaher
Interior architect Pierre Yovanovitch with pieces from his recently launched eponymous furniture brand.
French designer, and 2020 GRAY Awards judge, Pierre Yovanovitch has launched his first-ever furniture brand with a wide-ranging collection inspired by Provence—the region in southeastern France where he was born.
Launched last month with a special installation at the historic Académie de l’Architecture building in Paris’s Place des Vosges, Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier offers 45 pieces of furniture (including lighting and accessories) and build’s off the designer’s two decades of creating custom pieces for his high-end interior architecture projects, which include the Le Coucou Hotel in Meribel, France, the Quinta Da Corte hotel and winery in Portugal, and the Kering Headquarters in Paris. Combing Yovanovitch’s love of art and nature, and his signature understated elegance, the new collection is quintessentially French with a contemporary edge.
To celebrate the launch of the line, and the upcoming opening of Yovanovitch’s first permanent brick-and-mortar showroom space in Paris, GRAY caught up with him to hear more about the label, the inspirations behind it, and why he chose to launch now.
Why did you feel that now was the time to make this pivot and launch your furniture brand?
After years of creating custom pieces for my interiors projects—and with the launch of my two collections (OOPs and LOVE) for R & Company gallery in New York—I felt like that facet of my design work was ripe for fruition, so to speak. It was a lifelong dream of mine to have a furniture brand, but I wanted to hold off until I felt like my practice, both from a bandwidth and recognition standpoint, was at the right stage for launching an endeavor like this.
The collection is quite large—45 pieces— why not just start with a small capsule collection?
I wanted to launch the new furniture brand with a large range of offerings, so it felt a bit more substantial than my previous gallery collections and also to offer a wide variety of pieces from the start. Several of these works were many years in the making from a design perspective and are iterations of concepts that we had come up with for private interior projects that I wanted to bring to the wider public, so certainly there was an element of wanting to bring light to designs that have been in the works for some time.
The Asymmetry armchair and ottoman with the Marsha floor lamp and gleed-ceramic Candy Pebble side table.
Can you talk about the inspiration behind the collection?
The [French] Riviera from my childhood—its various landscapes, its artists, its unique historic villas, and its light—was a big inspiration for me. The Provence, that I love, which, [according to author Jean Giono], “hides its mysteries behind the obviousness.” Also, there is Northern Europe, where gold, forests, night, and colors give life to simple and graceful pieces of furniture. All these worlds and others, from French Art Deco to American modernism, have built my culture and formed my taste. I’m offering a furniture line that unveils my passion for craftsmanship, for traditional and innovative techniques, for the visible and invisible, and for natural materials.
In many ways, the new brand is a celebration of this “haute craft” design approach which has become synonymous with my work over the years. It is taking the quality and uncompromised attention to detail out of the context of a private residence or limited-edition gallery model and making it available to a wider, global audience. In the era of mass-production with furniture design, it’s crucial to the integrity of my work to offer long-lasting pieces.
FROM LEFT: The Clifford ottoman, Woody sofa, and Flint armchair—newly designed pieces from Pierre Yovanovitch's recent furniture brand launch.
How do you feel that your collection draws from or builds upon the furniture canon?
The design process is quite different than creating custom pieces for an interior project, as you’re not designing to fit the specific needs/daily lifestyle of the client. In this way, there is a fair amount of freedom that comes with the designs of the new furniture brand. We found an opportunity to focus more on the story of the individual piece. When it comes to material choice, at the heart of everything is our commitment to craft and longevity. For these new works, I also wanted to look beyond my signature use of wood to incorporate new materials, such as polished bronze, gypsum (mirrors, side tables), and patinated metals.
We create every piece to be loved and lived with for a lifetime. We aim to create aesthetically timeless pieces that are made using natural and local materials whenever possible, such as local woods (produced locally to promote short supply chains, from eco-certified forests; FSC, PEFC), natural fibers (wool, linen, silk), and organic solvents.
