Belgian designer and artist, Lionel Jadot, has been named designer of the year and will showcase his talent and skills at Maison&Objet in September.
Jadot was raised in a cabinet-making workshop in a popular neighbourhood in Brussels, where his family had been carving armchairs, sofas and chairs for six generations, igniting his passion for design and recycling.
“I was quite literally born in a workshop,” he says.
“My DNA comes from several generations of chair makers, established since 1895 in the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels. I grew up with my parents and my sister above a 3,000 m2 cabinet-making workshop, surrounded by felled beeches and 35-odd craftsmen making sofa frames and upholstering seats and armchairs. It made me who and how I am today.
“This workshop was a place where anything was possible, a playground where I was allowed to pick up anything that fell off the worktables: wood shavings, cracked Louis XVI-style table legs and curved armrests where knots in the wood had splintered. These discarded materials were like the contents of a treasure chest to me.”
This year’s theme for Maison&Objet is Terra Cosmos, which aligns with what Jadot believes in.
“I grew up with science fiction, reading Dune and the Moebius comics. We’re just an insignificant speck of dust in the universe, but I believe in distant universes, parallel worlds and extraterrestrial life.
“With artificial intelligence (AI), we are now living in a world of science fiction. As soon as the first OpenAI tools were launched, my team and I rushed out to test them. We fed them all kinds of data and let our minds run wild.”
For his project at Maison&Objet, he is looking to create a central pavilion that will illustrate his philosophy of hospitality in a radical and experimental way.
“A whole series of artists will be involved, each using different techniques for processing recycled materials. The idea is not simply to appreciate the design, but the way in which it was produced. The experience and the storytelling are equally important points,” he enthuses.
“Everything will come directly from a designer’s workshop. For example, there will be a table with a beechwood base, upon which a mushroom top has been grown. This mycelium will be passed through a special kiln in order to kill any bacteria and make the material very hard. The bedroom and living room will be housed in a dome inspired by the Kogetsudai moon-viewing platform, a sand cone built centuries ago near Kyoto.”
Maison&Objet is held in Paris from 5 to 9 September 2024.
Related News
