Modern furniture restoration & research
Restoration of a wonderful room divider from the Unité d’habitation in Marseille. Designed by Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier in the early 1950s. Rebuilding a missing drawer (including 20 hand-cut dovetails), replacing broken pieces, ageing wood and color matching old paint.
HELSINKI — In general, it’s quite common to paint ‘old’ furniture. Particularly in the seventies, there was a trend to update inherited furniture with a fresh coat of white paint. That goes indeed for this wonderful set of sculptural 42 armchairs, designed by Alvar Aalto in 1932. But after stripping carefully the layers of paint with different techniques, the original bent lamination and birch plywood came back to life in all it’s beauty.
Coat rack designed by Alvar Aalto, Artek 1936
With the workshop ‘Design your archive!’ at the Biënnale Interieur, the CVAa challenges designers and producers to reflect on how they take care of their archives and collections. A Modern View has been asked to talk the about the importance of design archives and collections.
This Serpente table lamp by Elio Martinelli spent some time outside (the horror!) and was in need of some urgent repairs: minor fixes in the electrical wiring but especially a new paint job. On special request the end result had to look original, as in ‘it had to look its age’.
A Modern View takes part in arts festival TUMULT#2 in Ghent, Belgium. Click here to download the program:
This kitchen was designed around 1949 by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand for the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. A unique piece that has been in use for over 60 years. An amazing project that will require a great deal of research!
In this set of four chairs the process of restoration is shown in the finishing, done in shellac, a traditional technique. As well in the seating: the woven seat is replaced by laser engraved ones, showing the original pattern.
This iconic lounge chair suffered from the typical weakness in the design: the whole backrest is only supported by two rubber shock mounts in the armrests. Over the years, the rubber becomes hard and brittle and eventually it breaks. Or even worse; like in this case, the plywood cracks. It’s a very common problem with these old chairs, so we took this as a challenge to find a solution.