Back to the Future: Pierre Gonalons

As the Oscar-winning film The Artist proved, 1930s style is Right On Right Now. Looking back to that influential decade, young French interior architect Pierre Gonalons has referenced the exceptional furniture of Manik Bagh, the Modernist Indian palace designed in 1930 for the legendary Rao Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, by German architect Eckart Muthesius.

Inspired by the palace works of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Grey and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann as well as Muthesius himself, Gonalons has created five geometric designs: a bookshelf and a console that share the structure of Indore’s master-bed headboard, a sleek rectangular lantern, a modernist chandelier and a tripartite circular mirror, all made in glass and polished chrome. Designed in France, hand produced by Sam & Sara in India, this initial line is being launched along with his other designs in Gonalons’s new Paris gallery Ascète. A second Manik Bagh edition will be added in the autumn.

2 Galerie Vivienne, 2nd, 01.40.15.07.97. www.ascete.com

Originally published in the May 2012 issue of France Today