Luis Laplace’s armchair is the main piece of the reading room created for AD Intérieurs 2015 at Palais d’Iéna in Paris. The use of an 18th century tapestry stitched upside down on the back of the Laplace Bespoke bespoke armchair mixed with threads added by an embroiderer epitomized the ambition of Luis Laplace to mix time and styles to approach interiors in a radically new fashion yet without any ostentation.
If you follow fashion, you’ ll know that embroidered textiles will be huge. I just attended yesterday a WGSN Trend Talk on Women AW 16/17, and we can expect a great deal of folkloric, romantic and luxury embroidery for the upcoming season, mostly on dark backgrounds.
This piece is also the result of several encounters that the architect has had during his life.
When he was a child, Luis was regularly in the care of his great-grandmother Ana Laplace, artist and embroiderer, who watched over him sitting on a stool facing her loom and embroidered textiles.
Luis has kept the memory of his grandmother begging him to stay still while he was seating on the floor in front of the loom, while she was embroidering a tapestry which he could just see upside down from his point of view. According to him, this was the ultimate outcome of the embroidery work and what the embroiderer intended to create: the reverse of the tapestry and its tangled threads dotting the canvas offered him one of his first emotional and aesthetic experiences. The subtlety and the mixing colors, the blurry end result, and the imprecise and interlocking shapes form an abstract pattern where brush strokes are visible as an expressionist painting. The front becomes underside.
I hope we are going to see much more of this technique in the Interior Design World. G, x
