Charlotte Perriand
1903–1999
French designer who moved modernism from tubular steel to pine and rope, and furnished an entire alpine resort along the way.
1927–1987
French architect turned cabinetmaker who worked almost entirely in solid elm, joined it with wedged mortises, and hid nothing.
Why they matter
Chapo studied architecture at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and turned to woodworking after meeting a shipbuilding carpenter in 1947. He opened a Paris gallery in 1958 showing his own work alongside Noguchi's, made a bed for Samuel Beckett that became the L01 Godot, and in 1967 moved the workshop to Gordes in Provence.
Everything is numbered rather than named. The S24 and S45 chairs, the T21 and T14 tables, the S38 bench: solid elm cut thick, joined with visible mortise and tenon, pegged where a screw would have been quicker, and left free to move.
Elm of this age checks along the grain and darkens to a deep red brown. Those splits are rarely structural and are part of what buyers want, since a Chapo top that has been sanded flat has lost the surface it spent fifty years earning.
Available now
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- S24 chair
- S45 chair
- S11 chair
- T21 table
- T14 table
- S38 bench
- L01 Godot bed
Materials
- Solid elm
- Oak
- Ash
- Leather
- Cast iron
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- Workshop pieces are reported to carry a stamp, often under a tabletop and sometimes with a two-digit year, though no published archive documents its exact form.
- Chapo Création produces from the original archive today, and that is new furniture and must be catalogued as such.
- Model numbers are the vocabulary here, so a listing that gives a description and no S or T number is usually working from resemblance.
- Check the joinery: through tenons that are wedged and left proud rather than glued flush, and hardware in cast iron or brass rather than modern fixings.
- Prices have risen enough that unauthorised copies are now worth making, and the elm is where they fall down.
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