On the morning of April 28, 1925, along a stretch of the Esplanade des Invalides transformed almost overnight into a glittering temporary city of pavilions, one small building drew a longer queue than almost anything else at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. It was not the largest structure at the fair, nor the loudest. Modeled on the pleasure pavilions of eighteenth-century France - a modern-day Trianon dressed in ivory, Macassar ebony, and silvered bronze - it called itself simply L’Hôtel du Collectionneur: the House of the Collector. Inside, in an oval salon lit by a chandelier strung with an estimated twenty thousand crystal beads, beneath a dome eight meters high, a single Frenchman had assembled - piece by exacting piece - his answer to a question the twentieth century had not yet finished asking: what happens to luxury, and to craftsmanship, once the machine age arrives?
Above: Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes de Paris, 1925. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
That Frenchman was Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and by the time the exposition closed that November, having drawn more than sixteen million visitors from twenty-one nations, he was, by general acclamation, the most famous furniture designer alive. History would be even more generous. The exposition’s full name would eventually be abbreviated by design historians into a single, now-ubiquitous term - Art Deco - and Ruhlmann’s pavilion would come to be remembered as the moment that term acquired its meaning. A century later, in 2025, Paris marked the centenary of that exposition with a citywide season of exhibitions, and the name anchoring almost every one of them was still his.
This is the story of how he got there: a decorator’s son with no formal training in furniture-making who decided, essentially through sheer force of taste and will, to become the finest cabinetmaker in France since the eighteenth century - and very nearly succeeded.
Above: Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, in Paris, circa 1928. Image Credit: Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet
The Decorator’s Son: Ruhlmann’s Early Years in Paris
Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann - the name is also frequently inverted to Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, and both forms appear across museum catalogues and auction records without much consistency - was born in Paris on August 28, 1879, into a family with no connection whatsoever to fine cabinetmaking. His father, an Alsatian by birth, ran a solid if unglamorous contracting business, Société Ruhlmann, that painted, wallpapered, gilded, and glazed the interiors of Parisian houses and apartments. It was a trade business, not an atelier of artists, and the young Ruhlmann grew up learning it from the inside, working alongside painters and paperhangers rather than sketching in an academy.
He showed an early pull toward painting and had, by most accounts, no particular ambition to inherit his father’s contracting firm. That changed in 1907, when his father died and Ruhlmann - then in his late twenties - took over the business almost overnight. It is worth pausing on how ordinary this beginning was. Ruhlmann never trained at the École Boulle, France’s famous cabinetmaking school, and never apprenticed under a master ébéniste. He would spend the rest of his career, in fact, without ever personally carving a joint or laying a veneer. What he inherited from his father’s firm was not a craft but a client list, a workforce, and - crucially - the working capital of a profitable trade business, which he would soon use to bankroll a far more ambitious, and for years distinctly unprofitable, artistic obsession.
The turning point came in 1910, when Ruhlmann, newly married to Marguerite Seabrook, set about furnishing their first apartment together and designed every piece of furniture in it himself. The rooms attracted enough admiring attention among friends and clients that Ruhlmann exhibited publicly for the first time that same year, at the Salon d’Automne - the influential Parisian salon where the city’s design avant-garde routinely unveiled new work. It was a modest debut compared with what would follow, but it convinced Ruhlmann that his real talent lay not in painting walls but in composing rooms.
Above Portrait of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann by Laure Albin-Guillot. Image Credit METMuseum.org
Finding a Style: The Birth of a French Art Deco Icon
Ruhlmann’s earliest furniture, shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1913 - a floral-patterned chair upholstered in a busy print with bright green trim, today preserved at the Musée d’Orsay - still carried traces of the swirling, nature-derived vocabulary of Art Nouveau and the honest joinery of the Arts and Crafts movement, both already falling from fashion just as Ruhlmann was finding his footing. He would later be openly dismissive of the Arts and Crafts ideal of design made for ordinary people; his own instincts, and his growing clientele, pulled him toward the opposite conclusion.
Above: Emile Jacques Ruhlmann's Bergère known as 'Broken Ear'. Image Credit: Musée d'Orsay, Paris
His mature style - the one the world would come to recognize as unmistakably his - drew instead on two very different wells of inspiration: the restrained, geometric furniture then emerging from pre-war Vienna, and, far more decisively, the great French cabinetmaking tradition of the eighteenth century, particularly the neoclassical vocabulary of Louis XVI and the Directoire. From the celebrated Jacob brothers, royal ébénistes of the ancien régime, Ruhlmann borrowed details like the tapering saber-back leg; what he added was a distinctly twentieth-century sense of scale, restraint, and material extravagance.
Between 1913 and the early 1920s, Ruhlmann did not yet operate his own cabinetmaking workshop; his furniture was built to his designs by independent master craftsmen of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Paris’s historic furniture-making quarter, chiefly the firms of Haentges Frères and Fenot. In 1919, with the war over and a wave of newly wealthy Parisian clients eager to spend, Ruhlmann partnered with his friend Pierre Laurent to found Établissements Ruhlmann et Laurent - Laurent overseeing decoration and painting, Ruhlmann the furniture. With the help of André Fréchet, then director of the École Boulle, the firm rapidly built up a specialist workforce of cabinetmakers, finishers, and upholsterers. By 1927 it comprised more than sixty in-house master craftsmen - twenty-seven cabinetmakers, four finishers, a dozen upholsterers, and twenty-five draftsmen - a number that swelled considerably once the bronziers, lacquerers, and gilders subcontracted for individual commissions are counted; some accounts of the firm at its height put the full working roster past five hundred.
Above: A Ruhlmann cabinet featuring three drawers (1925) in burl veneer & ivorine inlay. Image Credit: wright20.com
To protect the integrity of an operation that size, Ruhlmann instituted what was, in effect, a numbered-edition system decades before “limited edition” became a marketing term: every model produced by the firm was given a registered name and number - Lassalle, Dubly, Cabanel, Ventru, Rasson - and every finished piece was branded with a hot-stamped “Ruhlmann” mark, sometimes alongside the mark of the specific atelier that executed it. A client buying a Ruhlmann cabinet was not simply buying a well-made object; they were buying an entry in a registry, traceable back to a specific design and a specific hand.
The Ensemblier’s Method: Materials, Craft, and Philosophy
The French have a word for what Ruhlmann actually was, and it is more precise than “furniture designer” or even “interior decorator”: ensemblier. Where a decorator, in the modern sense, assembles a room from furniture and objects sourced from many different makers, an ensemblier designed - or personally commissioned - every element required for a total, harmonious interior: not just the cabinets and chairs, but the carpets, the wallpaper, the light fixtures, even the door handles. Nothing was permitted to clash, because nothing was left to chance. Tellingly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds one of the world’s great Ruhlmann collections, describes his practice in precisely these terms - an unbroken chain of decisions, from architecture down to hardware, all answering to a single eye.
Above: Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann Bed (1933) in macassar ebony, oak, gilt-bronze. Image Credit: Sotheby's
That eye had unmistakable habits. A Ruhlmann piece is, almost without exception, built from a small repertoire of extraordinarily expensive materials: veneers of Macassar ebony - the wood most identified with him, prized for its dramatic black-and-gold striping - amboyna burl, and Brazilian rosewood, laid over stable engineered cores rather than carved from solid timber, the height of French ébénisterie technique, in which the beauty of the surface and the precision of the marquetry mattered more than sheer mass. Ivory appears constantly: as dentil-like stringing along an edge, as delicate floral marquetry set into a cabinet door, as carved drawer pulls, sometimes as a fine line tracing the silhouette of a leg. Shagreen - sharkskin, dyed and sanded to a texture like fine-grained suede - covers desktops and dressing tables; silk tassels finish drawer pulls; silvered bronze, rather than the gilt bronze of the eighteenth century he so admired, forms the sabots, or feet, and hardware. Carving itself was rare in his workshop; where earlier French cabinetmaking prized sculptural relief, Ruhlmann preferred the quieter drama of exceptional veneer, book-matched and mitred with such precision that the wood grain itself became the ornament.
Above: Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann Side Table (1925) in Amboyna burl veneer. Image Credit: Galerie Marcilhac, Paris
Formally, his furniture is almost deceptively simple: tapered, often fluted legs; gentle, barely-there curves; a horror of clutter and applied decoration for its own sake. Ruhlmann’s genius was not invention from nothing - he situated his own work explicitly within the lineage of French classicism rather than in opposition to it - but distillation: taking the proportions of Louis XVI and the Directoire and paring them down until only the essential line remained, then rendering that line in the rarest materials money could buy. The result looked, and still looks, both antique and startlingly modern at once, which is precisely why the term “Art Deco” - short for arts décoratifs, quietly replacing the vaguer prewar label “Style Moderne” - fit it so well.
Above: Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann Desk in Macassar Mahogany & Shagreen. Image Credit: Greenwich Living Design, New York
1925: The Paris Exposition That Gave Art Deco Its Name
The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened in Paris on April 28, 1925, and ran a little over six months, closing that November after drawing more than sixteen million visitors and exhibitors from twenty-one nations. Its purpose, as conceived by the French state, was unambiguous: to reassert Paris’s supremacy in luxury goods and applied art at a moment when German and Austrian design - the Wiener Werkstätte, the nascent Bauhaus - had begun to command international attention. The Esplanade des Invalides and the Pont Alexandre III, rechristened for the occasion “la rue des boutiques,” filled with temporary pavilions built by manufacturers, department stores, foreign nations, and independent designers, each competing to define what French taste would look like for the rest of the century.
Ruhlmann’s contribution, L’Hôtel du Collectionneur, was widely agreed to be the single most admired structure at the fair. Designed in collaboration with the architect Pierre Patout - a close friend, who conceived the building’s elegant neoclassical shell - the pavilion was imagined explicitly as a modern reincarnation of an eighteenth-century pleasure house, a townhouse built for an imaginary connoisseur wealthy and refined enough to have commissioned only the very best from the leading artists of his day. Alfred Janniot’s sculpted frieze, a tribute to the Renaissance sculptor Jean Goujon, crowned the exterior; the garden entrance was framed by wrought-iron gates and a bas-relief titled La Danse, both by the celebrated ironworker Edgar Brandt.
Above: The Collector's Hotel - Ruhlmann Pavilion. Image Credit: L'Histoire par l'image
Above: Ruhlmann Collector's Pavilion - Grand Salon. Image Credit: L'Histoire par l'image
Inside, the pavilion’s heart was its Grand Salon: an oval room beneath an eight-meter dome, warmed by a monumental crystal chandelier strung with an estimated twenty thousand beads, and centered on a curvaceous grand piano. Above a marble fireplace hung Jean Dupas’s now-celebrated painted panel Les Perruches (The Parakeets); the ceiling itself was painted by Rigal. Ruhlmann filled the room with his own furniture - including the graceful cylinder-topped writing desk in Macassar ebony and ivory dentils that he considered one of the finest pieces of cabinetmaking he ever produced - while inviting an extraordinary roster of fellow artists to contribute rather than working in isolation: a lacquered cabinet by Jean Dunand, worked from a motif supplied by Jean Lambert-Rucki; sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle and Joseph Bernard; François Pompon’s celebrated bronze walking bear; silk wall hangings by Stéphany; a carpet designed by Émile Gaudissart; lighting by the Maison Vian.
Above: Ruhlmann Collector's Pavilion - Dining Room. Image Credit: L'Histoire par l'image
Above: Ruhlmann Collector's Pavilion - Bedroom. Image Credit: L'Histoire par l'image
Other rooms - a vestibule, dining room, study, bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom - extended the same principle throughout, with additional furniture contributed by Henri Rapin and Francis Jourdain. Even the armchairs used throughout the pavilion, the so-called Fauteuil Collectionneur, an Empire-inspired design upholstered in Aubusson tapestry after Gaudissart’s patterns, are preserved today in French museum collections.
The effect, by every contemporary account, was overwhelming - a total, self-consistent world built to a single standard of taste, exactly what an ensemblier was meant to produce. It made Ruhlmann, almost overnight, into what French commentators nicknamed “le pape de l’Art Déco” - the Pope of Art Deco - and secured him invitations to exhibit in New York the following year, then Madrid and Milan in 1927, Tokyo in 1928, and Barcelona and Porto in 1929. More lastingly, it gave the entire era its name: “Art Deco,” shorthand for arts décoratifs, entered common usage as a direct legacy of the exposition’s title, gradually displacing the vaguer prewar term “Style Moderne.” Ruhlmann had not set out to name a century. He had set out to build the most beautiful room in Paris. He appears to have done both.
The Masterworks: Ruhlmann’s Most Celebrated Art Deco Furniture
Even a partial list of Ruhlmann’s most celebrated individual pieces reads like an inventory of what French decorative art was capable of at its most extravagant. Chief among them is the so-called État cabinet (1922), now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a case piece in Macassar ebony, amaranth, and ivory whose gently curved door bears an intricate marquetry bouquet of flowers rendered entirely in ivory and ebony, an object that reportedly demanded months of specialist labor. Related to it is a small group of corner cabinets and cylinder desks built around the same “État” family of designs, of which only a handful of examples survive; on at least one related model, the fluted legs alone are said to have required some fifty hours of work apiece.
Above: "État" Cabinet by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann - Designed 1922; manufactured 1925–26. Image Credit: The MET
Elsewhere in his catalogue of named models - Ruhlmann’s own registry reads almost like a private code, each design assigned a model name and number rather than a plain description - are pieces such as the Duval cabinet, a Macassar ebony and walnut-burr collector’s cabinet with ivory-filet inlaid doors (a later example sold for €119,600 at a Paris sale of Art Deco masterworks); the Lassalle chest of drawers, hot-stamped on the reverse and built on an oak carcass veneered in Macassar ebony; and a carved Vase table, its scrolled, urn-shaped supports a rare instance of Ruhlmann’s craftsmen carving solid wood rather than laying veneer, related to the ivory tableaux of flower-filled vases found on his earlier “État Aigle” cabinets.
Above: "Duval" Cabinet (Model AR 1511 / NR 2300) by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, designed in 1924. Image Credit: The MET
His most unexpected masterpiece, however, may be the Chaise Longue “aux Skis,” designed in 1929 and nicknamed, even in period documents, the chaise “du Maharadjah.” Built with an adjustable, black-lacquered frame resting on a pair of stylized skis in place of conventional legs, complete with a heated footrest and electric switches to control it, the piece was designed as part of a suite of furniture for the young Maharaja of Indore, Yashwant Rao Holkar II, though it was shown at the 1929 Salon des Artistes Décorateurs under the deliberately anonymous title of a studio-bedroom for a crown prince, so as not to reveal the patron’s identity before his palace was complete. Only two examples are known to have been built. It stands as proof that Ruhlmann, so thoroughly associated with eighteenth-century restraint, was equally capable of a startling modernist wit when a client and occasion called for it - and it remains, by auction results, one of his single most valuable creations, having sold for €2,865,000 at Christie’s in Paris.
Above: Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann's Chaise Longue "aux Skis" designed for the Maharaja of Indore in 1929. Image Credit: Sotheby's
Patrons, Palaces, and Prestige Commissions
Ruhlmann’s clientele reads like a cross-section of interwar wealth and taste: the banking dynasties of the Rothschild and Worms families; Eugène Schueller, the chemist-entrepreneur who founded L’Oréal; the couturière Jeanne Paquin; the playwright Paul Géraldy; and, in his earlier Salon d’Automne years, the legendary couturier and connoisseur Jacques Doucet, one of the era’s most sophisticated private collectors. The French state itself became a client, commissioning decorative work for the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the President of the Republic - placing Ruhlmann’s furniture, quite literally, at the seat of national power.
His most historically resonant royal commission, however, came from further afield. In the late 1920s, Yashwant Rao Holkar II, the young Maharaja of Indore, began planning Manik Bagh - “the garden of rubies” - an astonishingly modern palace in central India whose overall design and Bauhaus-inflected architecture were entrusted to the young German architect Eckart Muthesius. Rather than commissioning a single decorator, the Maharaja assembled a small constellation of Paris’s most advanced designers to furnish individual rooms: Louis Sognot and Charlotte Alix contributed furniture in glass and metal, Ivan da Silva Bruhns designed the carpets, Jean Puiforcat the silver - and Ruhlmann himself designed the furniture for the Maharaja’s private study, working within, rather than around, Muthesius’s overarching modernist scheme. It was an unusual arrangement for Ruhlmann, more accustomed to designing entire interiors from first principles, and it produced some of his most experimental late work, the ski-legged chaise longue chief among it.
Above: The Maharani’s bedroom at Manik Bagh, with design pieces by Louis Sognot and Charlotte Alix (1933). Image Credit: Shubha and Prahlad Bubbar Collection
Above: The Maharaja’s Office at Manik Bagh with design pieces by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Image Credit: The Taimur Hassan Collection
Ruhlmann’s influence extended, more diffusely, to the golden age of French ocean-liner design; his aesthetic - precisely the marriage of engineering-age glamour with old-world materials that shipping lines like the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique were eager to project - helped set the tone for the extraordinary Art Deco interiors of liners such as the Île de France. He was reportedly slated to join the team of designers assembled in 1932 for the Normandie’s interiors, but died the following year before any of that work began; his spirit, if not his hand, is nonetheless often counted among the ship’s stylistic forebears.
Above: Suite de Luxe Bedroom inside Ile de France. Image Credit: Ocean Liners Magazine
Ruhlmann Among His Art Deco Contemporaries
No designer works in a vacuum, and Ruhlmann’s Paris was crowded with serious rivals and collaborators. Süe et Mare, the decorating partnership of Louis Süe and André Mare, offered a softer, more painterly competing vision of French luxury; Jean Dunand, a frequent Ruhlmann collaborator in his own right, was pursuing lacquer to a level of virtuosity nobody else in Europe could match.
Above: A dining room by Louis Süe and André Mare, 1920-1921. Image Credit: madparis.fr
Above: A lacquered wooden game table by Jean Dunand (circa 1928). Image Credit: Galerie Vallois, Paris
A younger generation - above all Jean-Michel Frank, whose austere, materially rich interiors would come to define a very different, quieter kind of 1930s luxury, working at times with Adolphe Chanaux, a craftsman who had once executed cabinets for Ruhlmann himself - represented less a rejection of Ruhlmann’s standards than a stylistic reduction of them.
Above: Rockefeller's salon designed by Jean-Michel Frank - 1930s. Image Credit: Rockefeller Foundation
Eileen Gray, the Irish-born designer working in Paris, pushed in a more radical, experimental direction still; her lacquered Fauteuil aux Dragons sold in 2009 for a price that remains, by most accounts, the auction record for twentieth-century design furniture - a reminder that Ruhlmann, however dominant in his own moment, was one major star in a genuinely crowded sky. It is not an accident that when the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris marked the Art Deco centenary in 2025, it chose to frame the entire era around exactly three names - Ruhlmann, Gray, and Frank - as the three defining, and distinct, faces of French luxury design between the wars.
Above: Fauteuil aux Dragons designed by the Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray between 1917 and 1919. Image Credit: Christie's
Ruhlmann’s fiercest opposition, however, came not from rival decorators but from the emerging functionalist movement. Le Corbusier, already sketching the outlines of a very different twentieth century, attacked Ruhlmann’s work publicly and often throughout the 1920s, dismissing its elitism and arguing for cheap, honest, mass-producible furniture designed for everyone rather than a wealthy few. Ruhlmann never really answered this argument so much as declined to be moved by it. In a magazine interview given around 1920, he laid out his position with a bluntness that reads almost as a manifesto: new design, he argued, was invariably expensive to develop, and only a wealthy clientele could underwrite the research and experimentation required to create it in the first place, with ordinary buyers simply inheriting the results a generation or two later, once the innovation had been proven and its price had fallen. “Fashions don’t start among the common people,” as he put it. It was an argument for trickle-down taste, made decades before the phrase existed, and Ruhlmann built an entire career on the conviction that it was true.
The Final Years: A Deliberate Ending
The economic ground shifted permanently under Ruhlmann’s business model well before he did. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the depression that followed it devastated precisely the clientele his firm depended on; a business built around long, unhurried commissions in the rarest woods money could buy, for clients wealthy enough to be indifferent to cost, had little room to maneuver once that wealth began to evaporate. Ruhlmann kept working through the early 1930s regardless, continuing to design for the clients who remained.
In 1933, Ruhlmann learned he was terminally ill. What followed reveals as much about the man as anything he ever built. Rather than leave the firm to be run - and potentially diluted - by others after his death, he stipulated in his will that Établissements Ruhlmann et Laurent would complete only the commissions already underway, and would then be formally dissolved. He designed his own funerary monument for the Passy cemetery in Paris, entrusting its execution to his old collaborators from the 1925 exposition, the architect Pierre Patout and the sculptor Alfred Janniot, who produced a black marble monument titled La Flamme du Souvenir - the flame of remembrance. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann died in Paris on November 15, 1933, at the age of fifty-four.
Above: Ruhlmann's Tomb at the Passy Cemetery. Image Credit: Find a Grave
His nephew, Alfred Porteneuve, an architect by training who had worked alongside Ruhlmann for years and helped coordinate the firm’s international exhibitions, oversaw the winding-down of outstanding orders through 1934. Pierre Laurent continued a separate decorating and painting business under his own name. Ruhlmann did leave Porteneuve the right to continue producing a limited number of his uncle’s designs after the firm’s closure - but insisted, in keeping with a lifetime spent obsessively cataloguing and branding every model, that any such piece be explicitly marked to distinguish it from Ruhlmann’s own hand: dessiné par Ruhlmann, édité par Porteneuve - designed by Ruhlmann, published by Porteneuve. Porteneuve went on designing in a more austere, metal-and-lacquer idiom of his own until his death in 1949. It was, in every sense, a deliberate ending: a designer who had spent his career building a numbered, branded, meticulously documented body of work made sure that even his own death would not be allowed to blur its edges.
Legacy: From Rediscovery to the Art Deco Centenary
Fashion, as Ruhlmann himself might have predicted, moved on quickly after his death. The stark functionalism of the postwar decades had little patience for Macassar ebony and ivory dentils, and for several decades Art Deco furniture generally, and Ruhlmann’s work specifically, fell out of critical and market favor. The rediscovery began in earnest from the 1970s onward, as collectors and scholars - the French historian Florence Camard chief among them, whose exhaustively researched biography and catalogue remains the definitive reference on his work - began systematically documenting and re-evaluating his output.
Above: Book cover of "Ruhlmann - Master of Art Deco" by Florence Camard (1984).
That reappraisal culminated in 2004 with “Ruhlmann: Genius of Art Deco,” the first full career retrospective ever devoted to him, organized jointly by the Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, with an accompanying catalogue by Emmanuel Bréon and Rosalind Pepall. The Met’s presentation alone drew on some 225 works, supplemented by loans from public and private collections across North America and Europe, and ran alongside a companion exhibition, “Art Deco Paris,” placing Ruhlmann’s achievement in context alongside contemporaries and collaborators including Süe et Mare, Jean Dunand, Edgar Brandt, and Pierre Legrain. Today his work anchors the permanent Art Deco holdings of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and individual pieces regularly command six- and seven-figure sums at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the great Paris design sales.
Above: "Ruhlmann: Genius of Art Deco" (2004) at The MET. Image Credit: The MET
The centenary of the 1925 exposition, in 2025, brought Ruhlmann back into the spotlight more visibly than at any point since that Met retrospective. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris devoted a dedicated spring exhibition, “Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Décorateur,” to the lesser-known side of his practice - his work in wallpaper, textiles, and graphic design - before opening, that October, the far larger “1925–2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco,” which traced the movement from its Parisian origins to its ongoing contemporary revivals, anchored around three defining figures: Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, and Jean-Michel Frank. A hundred years on from a fair intended to prove that French craftsmanship could survive the machine age, Paris was, in effect, asking the same question about Ruhlmann’s own legacy - and answering it, once again, in the affirmative.
Why Ruhlmann Still Matters
Above: The Chevron Art Deco Chest inspired by Ruhlmann, from The Collectors' catalogue
It would be easy to read Ruhlmann’s story as a period piece: a brilliant, uncompromising designer, built for and by a narrow slice of interwar wealth, whose entire business model was destroyed by a single stock market crash. But the more durable lesson of his career has little to do with economics and everything to do with intention. Ruhlmann never designed anything he considered disposable. Every cabinet, every desk, every fluted leg that took fifty hours to turn, was built on the explicit premise that it would outlast fashion, outlast its maker, and outlast - in the case of the firm he deliberately closed rather than let drift - even the business that made it. A century after the exposition that gave his era its name, in a design culture once again arguing, as fiercely as Le Corbusier once did, over the relative worth of craft against speed and cost, Ruhlmann’s furniture keeps making the same quiet argument it always made: that real luxury is not a price tag but a decision, repeated at every stage of the making, to do the harder and slower thing. It is, in the end, the same decision that every serious workshop of hand-carved, hand-finished furniture - wherever in the world it happens to stand today - is still quietly making in his name.
Cover Image: Ruhlmann (centre) with his team of designers at 27 rue de Lisbonne in Paris (c. 1931)