Paul Bert Serpette and my cocotte defend Guillerme and Chambron

On the floor of "Ma Cocotte", it is difficult to pass by. With their wide seat, their structure of worked wood and their thick cushions, which can resist the desire to coil in these armchairs and sofas Guillerme & Chambron? And yet ... they have been forgotten, abandoned, denigrated. Created between the 1950s and the 1970s, their unusual foundations, defended for several years by the antique dealers of Paul Bert Serpette and dusted by Philippe Starck, are once again keeping an eye on the marketplace.

THE HAPPY HAZARDS OF THE WAR

Originally, a fortuitous encounter under extreme circumstances. The destinies of Robert Guillerme, a decorator-designer who had left the Boulle school, and Jacques Chambron, a painter and decorator, graduated from the Applied Arts of Reims, met in 1940 in a stalag in East Prussia. The two prisoners became friends and fled together to return to liberated France. They found themselves in 1949, in Lille, where they founded "Your House". Their leitmotiv in this country marked by lack and deprivation and where everything is to be rebuilt: the economic, the utilitarian and the comfortable. Produced in series in the Vosges, their furniture promotes a modest, robust and authentic lifestyle. Their large armchairs are a generous and welcoming rusticity. Almost reassuring in a devastated France.

THE COMFORT REDEVOVE

Products from 1949 to 1983, the Guillerme & Chambron salon sets have built their reputation on irresistible comfort and high-quality know-how. Associated with the Reconstruction style which marks the ten years following the Liberation, this cheap furniture is thought for a daily use. Waxed oak, light-colored, the armchairs and sofas are distinguished by a work of the back. Thought 360 °, they invite the one who would resist the call of their deep seat to turn them around! And the two friends do not stop at the seat. Helped by the ceramist Boleslaw Danikowski, they imagine furniture mixing wood and ceramics, such as these coffee tables on which today is enjoyed his chicken farmer Challans in my casserole. So it took Starck's spotlight to get that part of French history from oblivion. Chinée to Paul Bert Serpette whose antique dealers have defended this double signature for more than ten years, the sofas Guillerme & Chambron are again sought after in the alleys of the market. Still at affordable prices, it is necessary to hurry if one wants to offer the best of the French comfort to which one predicts henceforth a bright future.