Tongue Chair by Pierre Paulin for Artifort in Jack Lenor Larsen Fabric

It’s true — the colorful, sinuous Tongue chair looks just like its namesake. The Tongue’s designer, Pierre Paulin (1927–2009), had a knack for envisioning quirky sculptural chairs, like his Orange Slice chair (1960) and Ribbon chair (1966). Born in Paris, Paulin grew up under the influence of his uncle, automobile designer Georges Paulin, who invented the first mechanical retractable hardtop convertible. Design, it would seem, was in his blood. 

After Paulin failed to meet the French national academic qualifications to attend school at the university level, he pursued ceramics and stone carving but ultimately enrolled in the École Camondo in Paris and then went on to work for the Gascoin Company in Le Havre. His interest in nontraditional chairs became apparent in 1954 while he was working for Thonet — there, he began to experiment with stretching swimwear over chair frames. But his creativity peaked in his collaborations with Dutch manufacturer Artifort. In 1960, he designed his first project for the brand: his signature Mushroom lounge chair, a round armchair blanketed in a single piece of fabric that Paulin stretched over its entire frame.

“I considered the manufacture of chairs to be rather primitive, and I was trying to think up new processes,” Paulin recalled in a 2008 interview. “At Artifort, I started using new foam and rubber from Italy and a light metallic frame, combined with ‘stretch’ material.”

The designer wanted to appeal to the antiestablishment, Pop Art–inspired lifestyle of young people, creating chairs with comfortable, low-slung shapes in bold colors. Crafted from a metal frame enshrouded in foam padding and elastic fabric, the 1967 Tongue chair epitomizes that goal with its evocative, legless form that keeps its occupant lounging near the ground, a vast departure from formal chairs that require good posture.

Paulin expanded his repertoire far beyond chairs, designing the Denon Wing of the Louvre and decorating French President Georges Pompidou’s apartment in the Élysée Palace, both in Paris. But his legacy with chairs remains strong. Today, Artifort still manufactures Paulin’s Tongue chair, and, in fact, it continues to produce a number of the designer’s works from the 1960s and 1970s, many of which have been incorporated into the permanent collections of art and design museums around the world.

Jack Lenor Larsen was a celebrated American mid-century modern textile designer born in Seattle. He fostered connections throughout the design and architecture industries beginning in 1950, and today, his influential eponymous design company is widely recognized for its muted hand-spun textured textiles. Larsen manufactured fabrics all over the world for more than six decades, using both traditional and modern weaving techniques.

Larsen initially studied in the architecture program at the University of Washington before he quickly realized he was instead interested in furniture design and interiors. He earned his MFA in 1949 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art — the go-to art school for design stars of the mid-20th century. The following year he moved and opened a studio in New York City where he launched his career. 

For one of his first commissions, which was to design curtains for the Lever House — a New York City icon designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois — Larsen created a linen and gold metal-themed weave to complement the building’s famed glass walls. He designed similarly magnificent textiles for the Phoenix Opera House, the Wolf Trap Theater and more.

Nowhere is Larsen’s profound impact on textile design more evident than at LongHouse Reserve, his house in East Hampton, New York. Modeled after a seventh-century Shinto Shrine, the home and its surrounding sculpture gardens opened to the public in 1992. 

Larsen built LongHouse Reserve in collaboration with Charles Forberg. The property features sliding panels that showcase the revered artisan’s fabrics as well as works by Lucie Rie, Wharton Esherick, and Edward Wormley. The gardens feature sculptures by Willem de Kooning, Sol LeWitt and Yoko Ono.

Larsen had a solo exhibit at the Louvre in 1981. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Find vintage Jack Lenor Larsen lounge chairs, sofas, and dining room chairs on 1stDibs.