We continue with this second chapter of our study library to understand how design becomes permanent assets. After delving into the material universe of Diego Giacometti, we turn our gaze to one of the most unique, complex, and fascinating figures of 20th-century decorative arts: Armand-Albert Rateau (1882–1938), through the canonical book and complete reference on his work, Armand Albert Rateau: Un Baroque chez les Modernes, by Franck Olivier-Vial and François Rateau, published in 1992 by Les Éditions de l’Amateur.
Immersing myself in this volume has been an intimate journey to the streets of my beloved Paris, a city with which I maintain deep personal ties, vital lessons, and professional projects. As you flip through its pages, you discover that corners I have walked through countless times on business or leisure trips were the epicenter of monumental works that once went unnoticed; it is a city that always provides a pretext to return.
I think of Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, in the 7th arrondissement—a stone's throw from the Rodin Museum, a wonderful place and another magnificent author whose work has also influenced our own—where the legendary apartment that Rateau designed in its entirety for Jeanne Lanvin once stood. It is the work that has best endured over time and the reference for Rateau’s output around which the book's content revolves. Or the iconic Lanvin boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a house that more recently recovered all its magic and elegance with the unforgettable work of Alber Elbaz—whom we lost too soon—and where Rateau’s furniture once shone, which I overlooked during my first stays out of pure ignorance. The eye needs time, experience, and reading to learn how to see. Reading these biographies allows one to keep traveling and gives the curious much to enjoy.
The File: A Bibliographic Monument
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The Interwar Context: A Free Spirit Against the Machine
To understand the significance of Rateau, it is essential to place oneself in the vertigo of the interwar period. Europe was emerging from the First World War with a devastating urgency: to rebuild in a hurry. The mainstream avant-garde movement fervently embraced mass manufacturing, blind rationalism, and industrial standardization. While theorists and architects like Adolf Loos or Le Corbusier preached that ornament was expendable and reduced furniture to pure ergonomic and mechanistic function, Rateau made a radical decision: to follow his own path in absolute creative solitude.
He did not want to bow to the geometric and repetitive canon of the prevailing Art Deco practiced by many of his contemporaries, nor participate in the usual circuit of fairs and collective competitions. He remained on the sidelines of fast-consumption trends:
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"Rateau rarely thinks in terms of necessity or function, and even less so does he develop his designs under the constraints of mass production. On the contrary, he places himself far above the defenders of form governed by the quadruple law of ergonomic functionality, adaptation to standardized housing, manufacturing regulated by industrial processes, and the suppression of decoration [...] At the height of Art Deco, but without using its visual language, Rateau invented a new Baroque." In an era that was beginning to surrender to extruded tubular steel and lightweight composite, he championed sensual density, tactile richness, and a timeless fantasy free from mechanistic constraints. |
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From High Jewelry to Cast Bronze: The Mystery of the Great Houses
That mastery of Rateau's was not born of chance, but of a discipline forged in his adolescence. Trained between the ages of twelve and sixteen at the legendary École Boulle in Paris, the young Rateau did not aspire to be a mere cabinetmaker: without knowing it, he wanted to be an artist. To defend his absolute independence, he started by working as a draftsman for the most exclusive jewelry and goldsmithing houses in Paris—such as Cartier and Fouquet—and for the prestigious decorator Georges Hoentschel.
That early apprenticeship alongside goldsmiths educated his touch and his eye: he understood that a piece of furniture could be chiseled, assembled, and treated with the metric scale and millimeter pulse of a jewel.
The definitive leap occurred in 1919 when he traveled to Naples and Pompeii with his friend Louis Cartier. Upon contemplating the zoomorphic tripods, tables, and bronze candelabra preserved under volcanic ash, Rateau had a structural revelation: bronze was not a simple ornament or decorative applique on wood; it was the load-bearing architecture of the furniture.
Although the book does not detail the list of foundries—a common void in that era, where prestigious workshops kept their suppliers secret to protect their patents and processes—historical and museum archives reveal that his bronze masterpieces were forged in alliance with the most demanding Parisian foundries of the period, especially the legendary Maison Baguès Frères, in addition to artistic lost-wax castings with master craftsmen who interpreted his plaster models. Rateau applied vert antique patinas with archaeological resonance and hand-chiseled finishes that gave each piece an almost geological presence.
The Total Work: From Hardware to Landscaping
Another trait that most deeply identifies me with Rateau is his refusal to fragment design. He recovered the premise of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk): a space must respond to a single organizing mind, from the exterior structure to the very last screw.
Rateau did not build a table to inhabit a random room. He designed the boiseries, floor lamps, handles, upholstery, and bathroom fixtures. And in 1927, he took the decisive step toward architecture and integral landscaping. He designed residences of more than a thousand square meters where he modeled the terrain of the estates, drew parks and gardens, traced the fountains, and personally directed the civil and botanical works so that vegetation, stone, and metal breathed in identical harmony.
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To achieve this, he created a complex of workshops on Rue Gide in Levallois-Perret that, by 1929, gathered two hundred and twelve craftsmen: bronzesmiths, chiseled finishers, lacquerers, stone sculptors, artistic carpenters, and even weavers with their own looms. Mastering the entire chain from A to Z was not a display of arrogance, but the only way to ensure that the purity of the initial idea was not degraded in the factory. |
Resonance with JoverValls
Upon reviewing the life of Armand-Albert Rateau—who passed away in 1938 in his library on the Quai de Conti, leaving behind a monumental legacy just before the hecatomb of the Second World War—we find the clearest reflection of the values that sustain our house:
- The dignity of noble metal and honest finishing: Rateau elevated cast bronze to a housing structure against lightweight substitutes. At JoverValls, we work metals with millimeter tolerances and noble materials with the same conviction: we do not create filler pieces to be replaced over time, but elements whose structural solidity challenges the passage of time.
- The goldsmith's detail: From his past with Cartier, he learned that the quality of a piece is measured at the encounter between its parts. That dialogue is what we apply when articulating heavy metals with Spanish vegetable-tanned leather, where each joint, hidden screw, or edge responds to an absolute technical requirement.
- "Legacy": Rateau shared with Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann the certainty that one never begins with precarious design or commitment to the ephemeral. It is essential to materialize objects of dazzling excellence that only time and daily use can embellish.
Rateau reminds us to choose the permanence of objects over the expiry of passing fashion. We design and build so that in a century, each piece will continue to explain who we were and how we understood the nobility of matter.
