Pair of Mushroom Armchairs by Pierre Paulin, 1960s

Plush, sculptural and low to the ground, the Mushroom chair is seating that prioritizes comfort over formality. Designed in 1960 to envelop the body, it anticipated an audacious era of exploration and rampant challenges to conventionality, and with its bright-colored fabric and bold organic form, the Mushroom chair was an immediate hit upon its release. For French designer Pierre Paulin (1927–2009), who had been in search of new methods of manufacturing chairs when he conceived of this provocative piece, he’d come a long way. 

Paulin initially pursued ceramics and then trained as a sculptor in Burgundy, but gave up the latter after he injured his arm during a fistfight. Instead, he attended the École Camondo in Paris. “To make drawings of Louis XVI chairs was a good education, like learning Latin,”' he later said of his time at the institution. Early-career modernist experiments saw Paulin working with bent plywood processes and covering chair frames with stretched womens’ swimwear pieces during his tenure at Thonet — endeavors that would preface his celebrated work at Dutch manufacturer Artifort in the years that followed. 

The production behind the Mushroom chair was nothing short of revolutionary, even though it required minimal materials. Underneath its single-piece elastic stretch jersey cover, a frame of steel tubing covered with molded foam padding comprises the piece’s alluring shape. Paulin would continue to use this construction technique at Artifort throughout the decade, including in two of his memorable designs, the Ribbon chair (1966) and the Tongue chair (1967). Still manufactured by Artifort, the Mushroom chair is as striking and seductive as ever.

Pierre Paulin introduced a fresh breeze into French furniture design in the 1960s and ’70s, fostering a sleek new Space-Age aesthetic. Along with Olivier Mourgue, Paulin developed chairs, sofas, dining tables and other furnishings with flowing lines and almost surreal naturalistic forms. And his work became such a byword for chic, forward-looking design and emerging technologies that two French presidents commissioned him to create environments in the Élysée Palace in Paris.

Paulin was born in Paris to a family of artists and designers. He initially sought to become a ceramist and sculptor and was studying in the town of Vallauris near the Côte d'Azur — a center for pottery making, where Pablo Picasso spent his postwar summers crafting ceramics — but broke his hand in a fight. He enrolled at the École Camondo, the Paris interior design school. There, Paulin was strongly influenced by the work of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Arne Jacobsen, as was reflected in his early creations for the manufacturer Thonet-France.

It was at the Dutch firm Artifort, which he joined in 1958, where Paulin blossomed. In a few years, he produced several of his signature designs based on abstract organic shapes. These include the Butterfly chair (1963), which features a tubular steel frame and slung leather, and a group of striking seating pieces made with steel frames covered in polyurethane foam and tight jersey fabric: the Mushroom (1960), Ribbon (1966) and Tongue (1967) chairs. The revered designer not only introduced new construction techniques to Artifort furniture but contributed fresh materials, Pop art colors and dazzling shapes to the mid-century modern era as a whole.

In 1971, the Mobilier National — a department of France’s Ministry of Culture in charge of furnishing top-tier government offices and embassies — commissioned Paulin to redesign President Georges Pompidou’s private apartment in the Élysée Palace. In three years, Paulin transformed the staid rooms into futuristic environments with curved, fabric-clad walls and furnishings such as bookcases made from an arrangement of smoked-glass U shapes, flower-like pedestal chairs and pumpkin-esque loungers.

Ten years later, the Mobilier National called on Paulin again, this time to furnish the private office of President François Mitterand. Paulin responded with an angular, postmodern take on neoclassical furniture, pieces that looked surprisingly at home in the paneled, Savonnerie-carpeted Louis XVI rooms. As those two Élysée Palace projects show, Paulin furniture works well both in a total decor or when used as a counterpoint to traditional pieces. His creations have a unique personality: bright and playful yet sophisticated and suave.

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