Pierre Paulin, the designer of modernity and French elegance who knew the vocabulary of style, flatly asserted that he loathed all that was hard. In this case, he was talking about the walls and partitions of dwellings and reception spaces.

His most famous seats (the Oyster, the Tongue, the Tulip), as well as the salons of the Élysée palace and the other places he worked on, are often structured as very soft textile cells. He took a keen interest in rugs as ‘places of life’ and very successfully used soft materials that enveloped the body. What, then, can one say about the table, a necessarily hard object if it is to fulfil its basic function? Pierre Paulin designed many throughout his career. They assumed very different forms which were often marked by their period and the materials chosen.

When Pierre Paulin was starting his career after the war, he looked to the North and its simple and honest modernity. Wood, the simplest and yet not the most abundant material, structured this vision, which consisted of sober and elegant designs. Here the notion of ‘fitting out’ seems all-important: on the one hand, the designer thought of the relationship to the exact functions of the work of work and its offices, and on the other anticipated the widening of domestic usages and habits in developing elegant writing desks and highly practical coffee tables.