Jean Royère French, 1902-1981

"As a decorator I'm against decoration, in the sense that everything that is strictly 'decorative' is what goes out of style the fastest. When you've got a well designed piece of furniture, the form and volume live on; but in most cases the stuff that's added on is doomed to oblivion."
-Jean Royère

Career

Royère won a prestigious competition in 1934 to design the restaurant of the luxurious Hotel Carlton on the Champs-Élysées, garnering widespread acclaim and launching his career overnight. He founded his own company in 1944 and began building a global clientele, opening offices in Cairo, Beirut, Tehran, and São Paulo, with famed customers that included King Farouk, the King Hussein of Jordan and the Shah of Iran. The Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris held a museum show of his work in 1999, and in 2008, was the subject of a major posthumous retrospective at Sonnabend Gallery in New York.