Let’s dive into Part Three of the adventurous life of 20th century design trailblazer Charlotte Perriand.
Missed the first two episodes? Start at the beginning or jump into Part Two to get caught up.
After narrowly escaping arrest during a house raid by Viet Minh partisans, Charlotte and her daughter manage to leave Vietnam aboard a repatriation ship in early 1946.
On her arrival in Marseille, she reunites with her husband Jacques. Together, they travel back to Paris.
They have survived the war and Charlotte returns after six long years.
_|=|_ Charlotte embraces design in France
Charlotte’s life in Japan will leave a profound aesthetic impact on her future work. Fascinated by Japanese design ethos, she embraces elegant simplicity, functional beauty and expert craftsmanship.
On the left: Air France stacking table, 1954, follows the Japanese tradition of using individual folding tables that could be stacked after mealtimes. It is designed from a single sheet of aluminium, folded like a piece of origami. On the right top: Design for Takashimaya department store, 1955. On the right bottom: Double Chaise Longue, 1952.
Back in Paris, Charlotte receives a job offer from Peter Lindsay, the Scottish ski resort developer she had worked with before the war. Now a working mother, Charlotte is tasked with further transforming Méribel, once a quaint Alpine hamlet, into a glamorous and expansive ski destination.
The work is intense and time-sensitive, and the site has become a battleground for development. Méribel, backed by private funding, rises in direct competition with the neighbouring resort of Courchevel which is the government-subsidised brainchild of regional French authorities.
The first site to be developed in Méribel is centred around the “Hotel du Doron”. A tone-setting centrepiece with three chalets and developer Lindsay’s private chalet. Charlotte is in charge of interior furnishings, considered a key part of the overall architectural concept, and aims to fuse modernity with the traditional character of the Savoy Alps. In the aftermath of the Second World War, building materials remained scarce, but these restrictions sparked Charlotte’s imagination.
In the winter of 1947, the new ski resort of Méribel opens, with its initial clientele consisting of Anglo-French aristocracy. Once a quiet village in the French Alps, the Méribel of today is part of the “Les Trois Vallées” ski area, one of the largest interconnected ski domains in the world.
A few years later, Méribel developer Lindsay runs into financial difficulties. Instead of her professional fee, Charlotte is given a plot of land in Méribel. Another decade later, in 1961, she builds a family retreat there. Considering Méribel’s real estate prices today, what a sweet payoff that deal turned out to be!
Above: Charlotte’s chalet in Méribel, 1961.
In 1950, Charlotte collaborates once again with Le Corbusier—this time on the iconic project “La Cité Radieuse” in Marseille. Often cited as an inspiration for Brutalist architectural philosophy, this modernist housing block is known as the first and most famous example of the “Unité d’Habitation”—as it is called in its original conceptualisation.
Charlotte is in charge of the interior design of a representative apartment, which will serve as the prototype for similar projects across Europe. One of her trademarks would become her built-in furniture designs and ingeniously crafted storage walls. She still is an ardent admirer of Le Corbusier and speaks with loyalty about him.
Fun Fact: When describing the Unité d’Habitation Project, Wikipedia is anxious to immediately mention hat Charlotte developed those interior designs “in collaboration with Atelier Le Corbusier” and that she “additionally collaborated on the design of the apartment kitchens”. When Wikipedia then speaks in the same paragraph about Charlotte’s design colleague Jean Prouvé who developed the steel stairs and the aluminium kitchen counters for the project, we don’t need to be informed that this was in collaboration with Atelier Le Corbusier.
Praised is Charlotte’s new kitchen-bar integrated in the living room so the mistress of the house can stay in earshot with family while cooking and not being locked up in a separate kitchen. “Gone were the days when a woman was completely isolated like a slave at the northern end of the corridor,” Charlotte remarks in her autobiography.
The idea that cooking wasn’t solely a woman’s task but a shared responsibility within the family — well, that was a step too far back then, even if it was only several decades ago. Charlotte was, after all, a child of her time and, as an interior designer, had to cater to a progressive but not radical audience.
Above: Kitchen prototype for La Cité Radieuse in Marseille, 1949.
After the war, Charlotte cannot call herself “architect” any more as the new Vichy government had set the rule that the Order of the Architects can only be graduates of an École des Beaux-Arts, a School of Fine Arts. And she doesn’t appeal to a special committee to overcome this ruling for her situation. She is happy with her role of “equipping” interior space.
Yet, she needed to be involved with architectural decisions, as she believes in interdisciplinary teamwork. A mistake that she didn’t set her professional record straight, I believe. Women have traditionally not been educated to be wanters. Or, it shows how confident and carefree she was, solely focused on her work!
In 1952, Charlotte teams up with a fascinating artist. It is Sonia Delaunay, a pioneer of modern design and textile art, with whom Charlotte develops colour schemes for her furnishings of the “Maison de Tunisie” building within the Paris University Campus.
A mistress of synergistic collaboration, Charlotte recognised early in her career that combining complementary skills achieves far superior results than working alone.
Left: Sonia Delaunay. Middle: Bookshelf Maison de la Tunisie. Right: Room Maison de la Tunisie, Paris, 1953.
_|=|_ Charlotte returns to Japan and travels around the globe
In the same year, in 1952, Charlotte’s husband Jacques is transferred to Japan by his post-war employer Air France. She joins him in October 1953.
Preparing for her move back to Japan, she is obsessed with “interchangeable modules” for her wardrobe—just as innovative as she would look to design furniture. Four skirts and some tops, differently mixed up, would create sixteen combinations, embellished by scarves, jewellery and gloves. Nowadays called “capsule clothing”.
Charlotte’s next years are marked by mundane living, mingling with high society and extensive travelling. She is leading a privileged life and her husband seems influential and well-off. However, she rarely comments on him or mentions her daughter throughout all those years of travel in her autobiography.
Why should she? I don’t want to fall into the same trap we accept in men’s biographies and question in women’s narrative. Charlotte decides to focus on her personal experiences shaping her personality and defining her work. Her memoirs aren’t a tell-all, celebrity-gossip piece in the style of Hello! magazine. Anyone who expects juicy revelations in her autobiography will be disappointed.
Having arrived in Tokyo, Charlotte curates an exhibition called “A synthesis of the arts”. Under the patronage of the French embassy and the French Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Industry, Charlotte creates a distinguished event to which the elite of Tokyo is flocking. Even Prince Takamatsu of the Imperial House of Japan is attending the opening. Have I mentioned that the high-society affair is sponsored by Air France where her husband is employed? Charlotte knows how to mobilise her network.
Left: Charlotte Perriand, Japan, 1954. Right: Synthesis of the Arts, Tokyo, 1955.
Some anecdotes of the time tell the story of Charlotte hosting German modernist architect Walter Gropius during his official visit to Japan in 1954. Charlotte shows the renowned founder of the Bauhaus School the real Japan, unofficially. A Japanese tavern, the “Dawn Rooster”, once nestled along a tranquil beach and now swallowed up by Tokyo’s Narita airport, plays a central role in the unofficial tour. “Wild times!” Charlotte remarks of that night. Gropius decides to extend his stay and travels throughout Japan. Whether his sudden resolve is owed to the Dawn Rooster outing, we don’t know.
For the next two years, Charlotte moves back and forth between East Asia and Europe. On the last trip back from Japan, she and her husband leisurely make their way to Paris. They travel to India, to Chandigarh (Punjab’s administrative capital) to tour one of Le Corbusier’s architecture projects, a city planned for 500,000 inhabitants. The journey then continues through Karachi in Pakistan, Damascus in Syria, and Beirut, where they travel by car through the mountains of Lebanon. What an adventure!
Left: far left Walter Gropius and his wife Ise (also known as Mrs Bauhaus), Charlotte’s little daughter Pernette and Charlotte Perriand on the far right. Right: Synthesis of the arts, Tokyo, 1955.
_|——|_ Charlotte’s design concept
An important event is happening in 1956. The Steph Simon Gallery is set up. The names of the three contributors are on the gallery door: Simon, Prouvé and Perriand.
Steph Simon had already been an agent and distributor for the works of Charlotte and Jean Prouvé. The gallery held the production rights of their designs and Steph Simon granted exclusivity. He couldn’t distribute other designers without approval from both Charlotte and Jean. That was the deal.
Left: Jean Prouvé and Charlotte, 1953. Right: Nuage (Cloud) bookshelf, Gallery Steph Simon, 1958. Since her first visit to Japan, Charlotte was fascinated by the shelving units she saw at Kyoto’s Katsura Imperial Villa. They were arranged on the walls, in the form of a cloud, she thought. Nearly a decade later, she unveiled the modular bookshelf Nuage, with standardised parts to be rearranged in various configurations.
Though an innovative collaboration, the venture wasn’t a commercial success at the time. Charlotte describes her royalties from Steph as meagre. When Jean Prouvé leaves the triumvirate, Charlotte further expands on her affordable pre-fabricated design concept, the Do-It-Yourself philosophy she had started to explore back in 1936. Charlotte works with a modular approach of combining different design elements for people’s furnishing needs.
Sounds familiar? “Design it yourself”, IKEA cleverly promotes decades later with their online planning tools to “customise look and functionality that suits your space, needs and taste.”
Hugely popular today, Charlotte struggled to gain commercial traction with her DIY design concept, yet her design principles feel as fresh now as ever. She calls her concept the Art of Living (“Art de vivre”).
_|— Charlotte’s Art of Living —|_
- Embrace Simplicity by removing unnecessary decorations.
- Live in Harmony at home.
- Enjoy a degree of Privacy.
- Connect with Nature by opening an area to a garden or the sky.
- Regard Storage as a key interior design component and consider utilitarian walls as solution.
- Create Space that invites dreaming while lying on the floor, and offers children plenty of room to play.
_|— o —|_
Another Fun Fact: In 1974, the gallery closes and its remaining stock is sold to La Redoute, back then a mail-order firm, today an online interior retailer. You can imagine my surprise — La Redoute happens to be one of my favourite home furnishing companies. Now I know why!
Left: Room divider unit with plastic drawers and wood framework, 1956. Middle and Right: DIY leaflets, Steph Simon brochure.
In the years that follow, Charlotte embraces a range of creative projects.
A hotel on the coast of West Africa in French Guinea (known today as Guinea-Conakry). The League of Nations building for the UN in Geneva. A collaboration with Le Corbusier and the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa on a student hostel building, the Maison du Brésil, at Paris University.
In late 1950s, Air France sought to give its regional branches a fresh and modern image. Charlotte’s husband Jacques still works for Air France and recommends her as consultant. Under the slogan “the leading edge of progress”, Charlotte oversees the modernisation of Air France’s offices in London, Paris and Tokyo.
During her stay in London, she meets architect and furniture designer Ernő Goldfinger. He shows her around the city and invites her into his modernist 1930s family home in Hampstead Heath. Both designers are impressed with each other, and their creative encounter sparks a collaboration to design the French Tourist Office on London’s Piccadilly.
First row: Air France office, London, 1957. Second row: Erno Goldfinger’s letter to Charlotte and Air France office design, London.
_|\/|_ Charlotte designs ski resorts
At the beginning of the 1960s, Charlotte’s husband is once again posted to another exotic location. His new job is in Rio de Janeiro!
Jacques secures a beautiful house with views of the Copacabana beach and Rio’s Sugar Loaf Mountain. However, Charlotte stays with her teenage daughter Pernette back in Paris. She is set to kick-start a series of new mega projects and visits her husband whenever she can make time from work.
After spending six years in Rio, Jacques will be re-posted to Tokyo to develop Air France’s routes in Asia. In her autobiography, Charlotte admits to “slightly regretting” not having visited Jacques more frequently during his six-year stint in Rio. She adds though that she “didn’t need to go off in search of happiness – it was inside me”.
Left: The couple’s house in Rio, 1963. Right: Charlotte’s Rio bookcase, 1963.
So, what were the large-scale projects that kept Charlotte in Paris?
In 1962, Charlotte is invited to embark on a long-term building program to design a series of ski resorts in the French Alps. An unlikely team of real estate developer and local ski instructor, Roger Godino and Robert Blanc, had joined forces to kick off the development of a tiny mountain village to what is now one of the largest ski resorts in the world, the Les Arc Paradiski Resort.
For the next 25 years, Charlotte is immersed in her beloved Savoy Alps and oversees the design of three of the four villages that make up Les Arcs. Named by their altitude, the resorts were Arc 1600 (which opened in 1968), Arc 1800 (established in 1974) and Arc 2000 (opened to the public in 1979).
First row: Interior design Les Arcs. Last row left: Les Trois Arcs, photos 1-4 (c) Adam Štěch. Last row right: Table top and side view, Les Arcs 1800, 1976.
Charlotte was well into her 60s—which some ageists might regard as the twilight of her career—when she was tasked with turning an untouched alpine landscape into a bustling ski resort. Over the next two decades, Charlotte would be responsible for pioneering the resort’s urban and architectural planning, as well as the interior design for thousands of accommodations.
In hindsight, it was a project perhaps too optimistically judged, as it marked the beginning of over-skiing tourism. Yet its origins were notably thoughtful and stylish. Looking up these hotels nowadays on popular booking apps, expecting once delicately designed spaces, it’s hard to shake the disappointment at how run-down both the exteriors and interiors appear.
What may seem today, over half a century later, like a rather tired set of buildings is largely the result of poor upkeep exacerbated by mass tourism.
Above: Residence Les Trois Arcs, 2020. Right: Residence Le Versant Sud, Les Arcs 1600, 1974.
Not many apartments have kept the original furnishings. Often, they were mixed with other furniture, and on pertinent auctioning websites, you can bid on those sought-after design objects like “Console from the rooms of the 3 Arcs hotel” or “Bar tray designed by Charlotte Perriand for the ski resort Les Arcs 1800 in France in the 1970”.
Originally, the residential complexes were designed for guests who spent most of their time outdoors on the slopes. The stepped buildings lean into the mountainside, as if to merge with the surrounding nature, while the resort’s apartments featured minimalist rooms and large windows.
Standardised kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated, and designed for plug-and-play so the modular elements could be craned into place and quickly connected to water and electricity. Charlotte made good use of her multi-purpose modularity and storage philosophy. Furniture was both integrated or mobile, storage were modular units, smaller tables could be combined to larger ones, or a bench could equally be a sideboard.
Above: Prefabricated kitchen, craned into place, Les Arcs, 1978.
She stayed true to her no-frills design concept. “I certainly wasn’t going to come up with decorative gimmicks just to please the customers,” Charlotte comments when speaking about communal space for the Trois Arc Hotel.
Charlotte was determined to respect the mountains and the natural surroundings of the project and built a team of like-minded architects, designers and engineers around her: Gaston Regairaz, Guy Rey-Millet, Robert Rebutato, Bernard Taillefer, Alain Taves, and Pierre Faucheux. They planned the resort to be entirely car free, each building was adjusted to have minimal visual impact on the mountain landscape and cowherd huts were preserved and integrated into the slopes’ terrain.
With one side projecting out over a ski slope, La Cascade is the most instantly recognisable building in Les Arc 1600, and in self-deprecating humour Charlotte remarks of this apartment block: “Locals came just to see the unusual façade”.
She overhears comments of visitors like “.. that was done by an old lady who worked with some geezer called Le Tordusier.” Of course, the talk of the mountain village was of 65-year-old Charlotte and her former employer, Le Corbusier.
Left: Pierre Faucheux (left), Jean Prouve (right), and Charlotte having a chat on the terrain of Les Arcs. Right: La Cascade, Les Arcs 1600, 1969.
When the La Cascade apartments were finally ready to hit the market, the sales teams proved not just unprepared, but seemingly unwilling to meet the challenge. The sales guys didn’t like the open-plan kitchens. They didn’t understand that the layout had been designed with women in mind, for the benefit of mothers and wives on vacation who shouldn’t be shut away in a separate room while cooking.
The sales people commented that studios of 16 sqm were too small and had “practical issues”. They didn’t understand the modular storage options. In short, the sales team simply didn’t believe in the implied modern way of living. Enter again Charlotte Perriand and her pragmatic hands-on attitude.
She unflinchingly gets involved in the sales process, educates the sales teams and presents potential buyers of how her design will enhance their living experience while keeping costs down.
Finally, market reality overshadows enthusiasm and further building activity. Funding was becoming difficult, sales were slow and apartments turned into a hotel. At the time, clients wanted different things.
Charlotte says of Les Arcs 1600 that it was “testing ground .. we each gave our best, and despite our errors, the result wasn’t bad.”
Above: Les Arcs 1600’s apartment block La Cascade is launching as second building after Trois Arc hotel & apartments, 1968.
The next village, Les Arcs 1800, opens at the beginning of the 1970s. It is yet again planned as a car-free resort and designed around aparthotels (a hotel and apartment combination), based on time sharing schemes to sleep 18,000 people. Charlotte is responsible for designing the apartments.
The project faced many internal difficulties and external challenges like the real estate crisis of 1982. Charlotte still burns for her work. She is 79 years old and says about Les Arcs: “It was a living creation, nests for mankind. I was so happy, I could hardly sleep.”
Yet, at its core, the project was prefabricated mass housing —though admittedly in a beautiful environment. Commercial setbacks and mental exhaustion took over, and in 1989, Charlotte finally resigns from the Les Arcs project.
She is now in her eighties and leaves the project rather disappointed as she feels the scheme became distorted and its design catered to the expectations of a more prosperous clientele—all to encourage sales of apartments.
This stood in contrast to Charlotte’s ideology of principled and democratic design, accessible to people from all walks of life. However, she acknowledges, after the hardship of the war years, potential buyers and hotel guests were looking for individuality, not conformity and budget.
_|———|_ Charlotte perseveres with courage
“When will it all be over?” her husband asks her. Jacques is fighting for his life and can no longer eat. Charlotte helplessly witnesses the tragedy of his slow death.
Wasn’t it just a few years ago when Jacques was stationed in Rio de Janeiro and she had furnished their beautiful house with her designs to cater to Jacques’ representational duties?
Wasn’t it just a few years ago when—amidst her busy schedule working on the Les Arc project—they had enjoyed their rooftop apartment with views over Paris, their “Piece of Paradise”?
And wasn’t it just a few years ago when they embarked together with their daughter Pernette on an adventure trip to the South Pacific Ocean, sailing aboard a dried coconut cargo boat and exploring French Polynesia, long before tourists had ever set foot there?
Jacques dies in 1986. Charlotte is 83 years old.
_|———|_
Her life stays busy. She keeps herself busy.
There is the retrospective of fifty years of her work at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. On this occasion, Charlotte publishes Art of Living, her “little red book”, to accompany her exhibition.
Ten years later, in 1996, the Design Museum in London reawakens her retrospective and dedicates a show to Charlotte’s lifework. She travels to London to attend the exhibition opening, and marvels at the Eurostar train as “amazing machine”.
While in London, she receives an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, celebrated in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall. What a proud and validating moment that must have been for the 93-year-old. Lord Snowdon leads her to her place and she remembers: “I had already met Lord Snowdon in Paris with Issey Miyake [famous fashion designer] and despite my ninety years, I felt as intimidated as a young debutante.” For the Royal College event, she wears running shoes.
In 1998, Charlotte publishes her autobiography “Une Vie de Création”, a Life of Creation. She reiterates that all she wanted was “gimmick-free modernism”.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, a contemporary art museum and cultural centre in Paris, reconstructs Charlotte’s work with an elaborate large-scale show in 2019. Under the title Charlotte Perriand – Inventing a New World, the exhibition connects the dots by presenting her work in the context of her collaborations with artist friends such as Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay and Alexander Calder.
The 2021 Design Museum exhibition Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life was another compelling retrospective that explored her creations through the lenses of modernism, nature and modularity, while celebrating her as a pioneering female designer.
As Charlotte Perriand’s work gains greater recognition and reaches a wider audience, I expect many more such exhibitions to crystallise in the years to come.
_|||_ _||_ _|_ _
In her nineties, Charlotte launches a new project. She jumps at the opportunity to buy the flat across from hers, and creates a stairless space that combines home and studio.
At 91 years old, she enthusiastically takes on remodelling her apartment and delights in adding a terrace with panoramic views over Paris. With a hammock that “swayed in the evening breeze”, she reports.
Charlotte died in 1999. She was 96 years old.
Charlotte had lived a colourful life of creation and mastered the ups and downs of existence with skill, optimism, and curiosity. She also understood that a good deal of luck must not be underestimated, but rather thoroughly enjoyed!
Charlotte was a remarkable shaper of the 20th century modernist age.
© all photos: DR/Archives Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP, Paris