Charlotte Perriand and the Art of Living Low

Images are credited where they are not from the Rugberry house.

The residences of Arc 1600 at Les Arcs, the ski resort whose design Charlotte Perriand led from 1967, above the slope. Photo: DimiTalen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, licence

Charlotte Perriand spent her long working life arguing with the way design history likes to be told, as a parade of objects: the chair, the lamp, the table that defined a decade. The object, she insisted, was not the point. The person was. A chair mattered because of how a body rested in it, a kitchen because of who stood in it and who they could see while they worked, a room because of how people gathered, sat low, ate and talked. Her furniture is beautiful, but it was never meant to be looked at first.

Perriand was born in 1903 and died in 1999, and for most of the century in between she has been filed, unfairly, as a collaborator. She joined Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in 1927, after her installation Bar sous le toit, and the pieces that came out of those years are often credited to the studio as a whole. That is fair, as far as it goes. But it has tended to obscure the fact that Perriand had her own idea of what modern living should be, and that she kept developing it for decades after.

An art of living, for everyone

The Centre Pompidou describes her as a champion of an accessible art of living, and records her conviction that what matters is not the object but Man, in the old sense of humankind. It sounds like a slogan. In her hands it was a method. Begin with the body and its habits, then design the thing that serves them, then strip away whatever does not.

That approach set her slightly apart from the more monumental strand of modernism. Where some of her contemporaries designed rooms to impress, Perriand designed them to be used. Her interiors are full of low seating, built in storage, open shelves and surfaces at the height a person actually needs. They are rooms for living in, not rooms for being photographed.

Begin with the body and its habits, then design the thing that serves them, then strip away whatever does not.

Japan and the floor

In 1940 Perriand went to Japan, and the journey changed her work. Traditional Japanese materials and ideas of space entered her vocabulary, and she began making versions of her designs in bamboo, among them the Tokyo chaise longue. The material was humble and local; the form was modern; the result was something neither tradition would have produced alone.

The Japanese room also makes an argument of its own: that a room organised close to the floor is calmer, more flexible and more sociable than one raised up on furniture. In a Japanese room, the floor is the main surface of daily life. People sit on it, eat near it, sleep on it. Everything else is light, movable and secondary. For a designer interested in how bodies rest and gather, it is hard to imagine a more persuasive lesson.

It is also the part of her thinking that speaks most directly to anyone who cares about floors. A room that lives low makes the floor covering into furniture. It is where people sit, lean, stretch out and put things down. It has to be comfortable to the hand as well as the foot, natural to the touch, and calm enough to let the few objects above it breathe.

A mountain built for people

Perriand's largest project came late. From 1967, in her sixties, she led a team of young architects on Les Arcs, a ski resort in the French Alps that opened for the 1968 to 1969 season. It is one of the great demonstrations of her ideas at scale.

The buildings lean into the slopes rather than sitting on top of them, so that the architecture follows the mountain instead of fighting it. Kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated off site, an efficient and modest way of making many homes well. The masterplan was car free, giving the paths to people.

And Perriand insisted on open plan kitchens, so that women would not be isolated from the family during holidays. It is a small decision with a large meaning. A closed kitchen cuts whoever is cooking off from everyone else. Perriand opened it up. The person at the stove could see and talk to the people at the table. It is an idea so ordinary now that it is hard to remember someone had to fight for it.

Reconstructed, at last, as herself

The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris staged Inventing a New World, an exhibition that ran to 24 February 2020 and marked 20 years since her death. It was the first time the Gehry building had been given over to a single artist, and the show filled 11 galleries with full scale reconstructions of her interiors.

Reconstruction was exactly the right choice. Perriand's work does not make full sense as a sequence of objects on plinths. It needs to be walked through, sat in, seen as a whole room. Placed in their settings, her chairs and tables stopped being design classics and went back to being what she meant them to be: equipment for a good life.

Advice for the modern apartment

Perriand's ideas translate with surprising ease to the modern Indian apartment, which is often compact, shared by several generations and used hard every day. Her open kitchens answer a familiar question about who gets left out of family life. Her modular storage answers the problem of small rooms that must hold a great deal. Her love of low, flexible seating fits households where people already sit on the floor, gather on a mattress or lean against a bolster.

The lesson is not to buy her furniture. It is to begin, as she did, with how people actually sit, rest and gather in a particular home, and to shape the room around that. Keep things low and movable. Use natural materials that feel good to the touch. Leave space. Make the floor a place to live on, not just a surface to walk across. Her rooms suggest a simple test for any piece of furniture: does it help people be together, or does it only fill the space where they might have sat?

Rugberry notes

From the Rugberry house

Her idea that a room begins with how a body sits and rests is close to how we think about a floor. A rug in a room that lives low is a seat as much as a surface, and it needs a fibre that feels right to the hand.

If that way of living appeals, our handwoven rugs lie flat and firm, and our natural jute rugs bring plant fibre into the room.

In the Rugberry house

• Handwoven rugsFlat and firm, for rooms that live low.
• Natural jute rugsPlant fibre, good to the hand and the foot.
• The art of makingHow a Rugberry rug is made.

Rugberry has no affiliation with the studios featured. Images are from the Rugberry house unless credited.