The Circa EditThe Modernist Garden: 12 Pieces We Would Live With
Twelve lots from Escape to the Modernist Garden, chosen for what they do to a real terrace rather than for what they would fetch.
active 1950s
French welder who turned surplus perforated steel into public bench and terrace furniture, and gave postwar French gardens their look.
Why they matter
Malaval trained as a welder and built a business on a material nobody else wanted: perforated steel sheet left over from wartime munitions work. From the mid 1940s he pressed and folded it into chairs, benches, tables and litter bins, aimed at municipalities and priced so a town could afford them.
The furniture ended up in French public gardens and on private terraces in quantity, produced by Bloc Métal into the 1960s. The Radar armchair, from around 1948 to 1950, is the form most often cited. Everything is drilled, so it drains, dries and stays light enough to move.
Almost nothing biographical about him is documented, not even his dates. What survives is the furniture, usually several municipal repaints deep, and a perforation pattern that turns a bench into a screen when the sun is behind it.
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Radar armchair
- Perforated park bench
- Garden dining set
- Perforated steel table
- Perforated bistro chair
Materials
- Perforated sheet steel
- Tubular steel
- Lacquered metal
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- No maker's mark or label has been documented for Malaval or for Bloc Métal, so attribution rests on the perforation pattern and the construction rather than on a stamp.
- His life dates are not recorded in any source we could find, and attributed to René Malaval for Bloc Métal is the most honest form of the credit.
- Original paint is usually several municipal repaints deep, and stripping is only advisable where the steel is sound, because these frames rust from the inside of the perforations outward.
- Anonymous French perforated-metal garden furniture of the same period is abundant and much of it carries this name on resemblance alone.
Past Circa results
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