A Jean Prouvé demountable house gets re-mounted in Paris

This week Design Miami is taking over Paris’s 7th arrondissement and with it a Jean Prouvé classic. In the garden at Hôtel de Maisons, the hôtel particulier where the fair has based itself since it launched here three years ago, the gallerist Patrick Seguin has installed one of the demountable pavilions Prouvé designed at the end of the Second World War. The 6×6 Demountable House was commissioned by the French government as a temporary, lightweight alternative for postwar homeless communities. And Prouvé, a founding member of the Union of Modern Artists with Le Corbusier, who embraced industrialisation as many designers decried it, was the perfect man to execute it. Here, the installation serves as a reminder that affordable, dignified shelter is never beyond our scope.

Surrounded by the mansion’s elegant 18th-century limestone walls — onetime home of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld — Seguin has reinterpreted the structure's interior space. Nodding to its austere natural-wood panelling, he has reconfigured the three rooms into a contemporary chashitsu, or traditional Japanese tea pavilion. The low-lying minimalist furnishings introduce a subtle dialog between the Western architecture of Prouvé and the Japanese art of living and reflect the designer’s many travels to Japan, where he collaborated with architect Reiko Hayama.

Seguin has amassed one of the world’s most significant private collections of Prouvé’s demountable structures, all of which exhibit the designer’s quest for simplicity, lightness, efficiency and functionality. Seven of these have been assembled across his South of France estate in the Var, where they are at home in the wild Mediterranean environs.

The gallerist's participation in Design Miami isn’t restricted to the garden, however. Inside he occupies a central area populated with work by Prouvé and his peers: a Forme Libre oak coffee table by Charlotte Perriand; a sofa set designed for government offices in Chandigarh, India, by Pierre Jeanneret; and a Prouvé desk, swivel chair and Antony chair.

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