There is something ever-so-slightly disconcerting about sitting in a chair that you know to be worth more than €30,000 (almost Dh117,000). But in Guillaume Cuiry’s Jumeirah home, you’d be hard-pressed to take a seat without coming into contact with some design classic or other.
My unease at being ensconced in the Esox armchair (should I sit up straighter; where do I rest my arms; what if I spill my tea?) is something that Cuiry, director of La Galerie Nationale, has to deal with whenever he has guests. But the gallerist, who has been buying, selling and collecting vintage “art furniture” for 35 years, is adamant that whatever its provenance and worth, a piece of furniture is a piece of furniture, and should be treated as such.
“I have a table that was created in 1934,” he says. It is probably worth noting that the Suzanne Guiguichon table he is referring to sat in the Zurich Print Museum, which closed down in 1995, and was used to display two copies of the Gutenberg Bible. “I use it every day,” the effusive Frenchman says. “But I can tell you this. Even if you are just eating spaghetti with butter, if you are eating it on a famous vintage table, your spaghetti tastes better.
“Like with a vintage car. If you are looking for a 1954 Ferrari, of which only 10 were ever made, and you find it after 10 years of searching, believe me, even if you are just going to buy a loaf of bread in that car, your bread will taste better. These pieces have a story, they have a soul, they have a spirit.”
Cuiry's is a home in constant flux, with pieces often transiting here on their way to or from the gallery. "This is the decontamination site," he jokes. I visit the two-storey villa ahead of La Galerie Nationale's Art Pulse exhibition, which is running until April 27. There are removal men in every room, carefully encasing chairs, sofas and tables in reams of bubble wrap. Ron Arad's iconic Big Easy armchair sits semi-abandoned in the entrance hall, patiently waiting to be whisked away. This is one of the star attractions of Art Pulse, which also includes work by the world-renowned Damien Hirst, Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé and Andy Warhol. It is a world premiere for two Hirsts, incidentally, which are part of a private collection and have never been exhibited before.
In this house, every piece comes with a story. The Elda armchair in the entrance hall? It's the seat used by the villain Stromberg, played by Curt Jürgens, in the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Plus Lenny Kravitz is rumoured to have one in his bedroom. The Willy Rizzo sofa in the living room? Cuiry has a picture of Jack Nicholson lounging on it.
And the red two-seater Geoffrey Harcourt lounge chairs? According to Cuiry, they were created for a British Airways VIP lounge when it opened at Heathrow in 1971. “I like these pieces because only four were made, at a time before air miles or business class, when air travel was very expensive. So I like to imagine all the people that might have used them – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, maybe even the Queen.” It took Cuiry three years to restore the chairs, hunting down the original fabric to a company in Sweden, where he unearthed the last remaining six square metres.
There is, perhaps surprisingly, only one piece that Cuiry would never part with – a red 1972 Louis Durot table. “There’s no price. You can give me a million dollars, two million, but I would never sell.”
For Cuiry, buying and selling furniture has always been a process driven by emotion. Getting hold of unusual, original, vintage pieces can be a long and arduous journey, and requires a healthy amount of patience. “First, you have to find the piece. Once you find it, either it is for sale or it isn’t. If it’s for sale, it’s easy. Either you have the money or you don’t. But sometimes you’ll see the piece in a private collection and you have to negotiate for five or six or seven years.”
The four first-edition 1965 Warren Platner chairs in Cuiry’s living room are a case in point. It took the Frenchman seven years to accumulate the set. “I found two and I knew the set existed, but I didn’t know where they were. So then you have to investigate, through your network, on the internet, and through friends, where are the two others? And after that, where is the table?”
There was little sign, when Cuiry left school, that he would end up in the design business. He was, he says, predestined for a career in middle management. But one of his closest childhood friends, Jacques Lacoste, opted to study art, developed an interest in vintage furniture and set up a stand in Paris’s famous St Ouen flea market. With his partner in crime now indisposed on the weekends, Cuiry began to spend more and more time at the market stall, learning about vintage furniture.
“I was a manager during the week and an antiquer on the weekends. I started to buy and to sell, and then I left my job and did it full-time. It was not always profitable. So sometimes I had to go back and get a ‘normal’ job, to make some money to support this new habit.
“At the time, the beginning of the 80s, there was no market for art furniture. Everybody had forgotten Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé and all the other big designers. It was all about paintings and sculptures.”
In the early 1990s, Cuiry and Lacoste opened Galerie Jacques Lacoste in Paris’s Rue de Lille and in the early 2000s, moved to the prestigious Rue de Seine. “Now it’s the world’s biggest art-furniture gallery for the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s,” says Cuiry. “In the 80s we were the only art-furniture gallery. People thought we were crazy. And we were. At the time, a Jean Royère sofa was cheaper than a sofa from Ikea. But slowly, people started to become interested.”
And interest has escalated ever since. At The Collectors: Icons of Design auction, held by Phillips in New York last December, a Carlo Mollino chair from 1959 was expected to fetch up to $300,000 (Dh1m); it sold for $758,500 (Dh2.8m). The Goodyear Table by Isamu Noguchi sold for a sterling $4.45m (Dh16.3m), instead of the anticipated $3m (Dh11m); while the Managing Committee Table by Balkrishna Doshi and Le Corbusier fetched more than $1.8m (Dh6.6m), instead of an estimated $400,000 (Dh1.5m).
Cuiry cites the sale of the Ours Polaire sofa by Jean Royère – his favourite designer – as a prime example of the buoyancy of the market. In November, at a Sotheby’s auction, the sofa sold for €397,500 (Dh1.5m). A month later at the Phillips auction, the same sofa with two armchairs, went for $842,500 (Dh3m) – a growth almost impossible to replicate in the contemporary-art world.
“Between 2008 and 2010, there was a huge art crisis; prices dropped by an average of 70 per cent. In art furniture, the market grew by between 20 and 22 per cent; in the worst year, prices increased by 18 per cent.”
Cuiry attributes furniture’s reversed fortunes over the past three decades to a handful of personalities. “The most significant change was when the big families – the Rothschilds, the Arnaults and the Pinaults – introduced these kinds of pieces in their homes and the market followed. They are good buyers. They discovered a lot of contemporary artists and designers and we have to thank them for that. It was similar with art. In Italy, you needed the big families to buy da Vinci’s pieces; others followed.”
In 2012, having seen vintage furniture established as a recognised, respected segment of the art market in Europe, Cuiry decided to move to Dubai and start the whole process from scratch. The design market was in its infancy here and it took time (and a boatload of that aforementioned patience) for Cuiry to drum up interest and, perhaps more importantly, establish trust. The first year-and-a-half was particularly testing, Cuiry admits. Then a member of one of the UAE’s royal families bought one of his pieces, which he took as a sign that the tide was turning.
A key selling point at the Dubai gallery is pricing. You can expect to pay less here than you would for the same piece in Europe. “The market is not yet mature, plus rents are cheaper than in Paris and there is no VAT. So my customers can expect to take the European price and remove around 20 per cent.”
If you are looking for an entry point into the art-furniture market, Cuiry recommends starting with smaller pieces, such as a coffee table or lamp, rather than big investment pieces – sofas or a dining table. And not all vintage furniture costs a fortune, either, he says. You can pick up something interesting for as little as $1,000 (Dh3,670).
But one word of warning: “With art furniture, once you start, you can never go back,” Cuiry says with a smile. “When you buy a rare, original piece, with a soul and a story, you cannot go back. When you walk into your living room, your eye will always fall on that piece, and when you have guests, that’s the piece you’ll always be talking about.”
sdenman@thenational.ae