How Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann inspired our cabinet maker Juliette Lemaignen.
23rd April 2022
Our cabinet maker Juliette Lemaignen leads the Made By Simpson Studio workshop team that lovingly hand craft all of our bespoke furniture pieces. She recently talked to us about Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann who inspires her greatly and who she learned much about during an internship at Atelier Benoit Blaise, a workshop situated on the historical rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, one of the oldest streets in Paris, known for its concentration of cabinetmakers who set up workshops in the 15th century.
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann was a French interior designer and cabinet maker, born in 1879. He is considered one of the most important and influential figures of the Art Deco movement, after his work received international attention at the Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925, the event which gave Art Deco its name. He is known as The Riesener of Art Deco’s, a reference to the cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener, the undisputed master of Louis XVI’s furniture in the late 1700’s.
For his furniture, Ruhlmann used rare and expensive woods such as ebony and rosewood, and other exotic costly materials such as coverings of sharkskin, and handles (poignees) and inlays (incrustations) of ivory. His designs are sleek, with a focus on elegant lines, lightness, simplicity, and rigidity.
It could take as much as eight months to make a single piece of furniture, and often cost more to make than what was charged for them. In his early years Ruhlmann had the work done by different Paris furniture workshops, but in 1923 he opened his own workshop, on Rue Ouessant in the 15th arrondissement, where his own craftsmen made the pieces.
Interestingly, the rare materials used, and the exclusivity of Ruhlmanns designs, produced a reaction from other designers and architects in the early decades of the 20th century, such as Le Corbusier, who called for simpler, functional furniture. Ruhlmann had chosen the elegance of Art Deco over the accessibility, targeting quality and wealthier clients over the humanist values of the modernist movement that proclaims that functionalism and distribution to the greatest number is essential.