From Steel to Straw: How Charlotte Perriand Humanised Modern Design

Founded by Mason Vincent and Jack Redpath, Darling is a furniture studio dedicated to curating an ever-changing selection of rare objects and collectible design pieces. From bases in Sydney and New York, the pair have developed a studio that sources, restores, and recontextualises collectible furniture and objects from across Europe, while championing a new generation of designers who share their respect for material and craft. In their ongoing series for Something Curated, the founders turn their attention to the figures who continue to shape contemporary design. The third profile looks to Charlotte Perriand, whose work framed modern design not as an aesthetic pursuit but as a way of living.

Charlotte Perriand’s work is best understood as an argument for living. Across six decades she treated furniture not as static form but as an active participant in everyday life, something that shaped how bodies, materials and spaces moved together. From her early collaborations in Paris to her late projects in the French Alps, she designed not for effect but for use, for the small, repeated gestures that define how people live. The clear language of her furniture has often been mistaken for simplicity. 

When she joined Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in 1927, Perriand translated their theoretical rigor into human scale. The Siège Tournant and the Chaise Longue Basculante, both made of tubular steel, leather, and exact proportion, gave modernism a body rather than monumentality. Even within that high-tech vocabulary, she insisted that furniture respond to living bodies, not architectural dogma. “Better to design for use than for show,” she later wrote, setting the tone for the rest of her career. (Barsac, Complete Works, Vol. 1)

By the 1940s and 50s, her focus had shifted from the machine to the hand. Time in Japan exposed her to joinery, modularity and the discipline of reduction. When she returned to France, those lessons surfaced in her work with regional materials: pine, oak, straw, bamboo. The Dordogne Chair, with its woven seat and solid-wood frame, reconciled craft and modern proportion. It was modernism slowed down to a more human rhythm. (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World, 2019)

That rhythm culminated in Les Arcs, the alpine development she directed from 1967 through the late 1970s. Barsac describes these years as the point where her philosophy reached full scale where “furniture became architecture and architecture furniture.” Working at Arc 1600 and 1800, she planned thousands of apartments, designing everything from prefabricated kitchens to door handles. Her pine tables and stacking stools echoed the slope of the mountain, the horizontal line of the horizon, the shared rituals of meals and rest. Prefabrication was not an industrial fetish but a means of economy and unity. Every element belonged to a system that could adapt over time. (Barsac, Complete Works, Vol. 4: 1968–1999)

The interiors she created there still read as prototypes for sustainable living. Modular storage eliminated waste, open plans privileged light and air, and the tactile honesty of pine, straw and aluminium gave warmth to collective housing. Seen through Barsac’s documentation, the project stands as one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempts to translate ethics into form.

Perriand’s later decades continued this synthesis. She worked on ski chalets, civic interiors, and exhibition designs, refining rather than expanding her vocabulary. The furniture of her final years included tables with thick timber tops, stools that double as storage, lamps pared to essential mechanics. Each piece assumes the user’s movement as part of its composition.

Across this long trajectory it’s admirable to see her intention never wavered. Furniture was not separate from architecture; it was the part most intimately touched. The order of her rooms came from the order of life itself: eating, reading, resting, chatting, all translated into material rhythm. Charlotte Perriand’s legacy rests in this comprehension of design as continuous experience. From steel to straw, from the atelier to the mountain, she built an architecture of living rather than of display. 

References

• Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand: Complete Works, Vol. 4 (1968–1999), Scheidegger & Spiess, 2019
• Jacques Barsac, Charlotte Perriand. An Architect in the Mountains, Éditions Norma, 2023
• Fondation Louis Vuitton, Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World, Exhibition Catalogue, 2019
• Design Museum London, Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life, 2021 designmuseum.org
• Galerie Downtown François Laffanour — Artist archive and furniture catalogue
  
  

Feature image: Charlotte Perriand, Studio Apartment in Place Saint-Sulpice, 1927. From Complete Works. Volume 1: 1903–1940