Rooms & ProjectsUnder $2,500: Where Collecting Modern Design Can Start
Eight lots in the current sale with a high estimate at or below $2,500, each of them by a designer with a documented body of work.
1910–2001
Hungarian-born Parisian who patented a way of perforating and folding sheet steel, then used it to make metal furniture that reads as light as fabric.
Why they matter
Matégot trained in Budapest and settled in Paris in 1931, working first on theatre sets and department store windows. Taken prisoner in Germany during the war, he learned sheet metal work there and afterwards built a whole practice on it. He patented the result as Rigitulle: perforated sheet steel that can be folded, curved and fixed to a tubular frame the way a dressmaker handles cloth.
The output ran from the Nagasaki and Copacabana chairs down to coat racks, umbrella stands, wall shelves and bar carts, mostly lacquered in flat blacks, whites and primary colours. Production was small, often a couple of hundred pieces to a model, and he left furniture entirely in the early 1960s for tapestry.
The perforation is the point. It makes a metal object that casts a patterned shadow and never reads as heavy, which is why these pieces still work on a terrace rather than only in a room.
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Nagasaki chair
- Copacabana armchair
- Rigitulle coat rack
- Perforated wall shelf
- Umbrella stand
- Bar cart
Materials
- Perforated sheet steel
- Tubular steel
- Lacquered metal
- Glass
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- Period pieces came out of Matégot's own Paris workshop, with a later branch in Casablanca, in short runs, and no period mark convention is documented, so form, gauge and paint carry the attribution.
- Gubi produces licensed reissues of Nagasaki, Copacabana, Dédal, Démon and the Trolley today, and those are new furniture branded as such.
- Original lacquer is thin and chips down to bare steel at folds and edges; a uniform modern powder coat means restoration or later manufacture.
- Perforated metal shelves and sconces by the Dutch maker Artimeta, several of them by Floris Fiedeldij, are regularly sold as Matégot and the two are genuinely easy to confuse.
- Attributed to and in the style of appear constantly on this name and describe a technique rather than an author.
Past Circa results
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- $2,100
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