Charlotte Perriand, the Coco Chanel of interior design

Parigi, 1903: nasce Charlotte Perriand. Figlia di un sarto e una sarta, Charlotte sarà architetto, arredatrice e designer, vivendo a Parigi fino al 1999. Nel settore si dice che Charlotte Perriand ha fatto per i mobili quello che Coco Chanel ha fatto per i vestiti: una rivoluzione dell’abitare che mette al centro il corpo.

A soli 23 anni - siamo negli anni Venti - la giovane Charlotte aveva già progettato la chaise longue per cui diventerà famosa in tutto il mondo, conquistando innanzitutto la stima di Le Corbusier. 

When she was 23 years old, during the Twenties, Charlotte had already designed the chaise longue which made her famous all over the world, capture the esteem of Le Corbusier.

In 1922 Le Corbusier started his own atelier in rue de Sèvres, Paris, with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, trying to define the human body positions scheme to use in furniture design. 

In 1927, Charlotte Perriand knocked on the atelier’s door with her own sketched of human posture and chairs designed around them. Four of them were the same that Le Corbusier was working on. 

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret immediately understood that she was a genius and their collaboration started to end only after ten years.

The work of these three minds together was able to create furniture that wrote the design history and enhanced the design culture. 

Thanks to Charlotte Perriand, it was possibile to face the truly disruptive problem of de l’équipement d'intérieur de l’habitation, a new idea of living as something free, friendly and relaxing. People started to really enjoy their home thanks to the new concepts of the trio, that made them artists and entrepreneurs at the same time.

During the Fourties, Charlotte moved to Japan to explore the expressive potential of the Far East Tradition, for example she started to design and build furniture with the ancient technique of processing bamboo. 

When she came back to Europe, she focused on a series of original productions, commissioned by top-level authorities and leading companies such as Air France, and by a number of foreign organizations, authenticating the fame she had by now gained on the international scene.