The story of the pioneering French ski resort taking London's design scene by storm this summer
London’s Design Museum isn’t the first place we’d look for a slice of the much-missed mountains this summer, but its latest exhibition at its home in Holland Park provides just that.
Charlotte Perriand: A Modern Life, opened at the weekend and is a glorious celebration of one of the 20th-century’s most prolific designers. But why does it offer a taste of the mountains? Because Perriand was the design force behind the creation of Les Arcs, one of the most popular ski resorts in the French Alps, and not only is a whole room dedicated to her vision and pioneering work for the resort, the exhibition tells the story of her design evolution that reached its peak in the mountains.
Regardless of whether you’re a fan of Les Arcs’ groundbreaking but compact self-catering apartments in Arc 1600, Arc 1800 and Arc 2000 or not, it’s hard not to be moved by Perriand’s humanity and skill, which is brought so engagingly to life by the team at the Design Museum.
“It’s been 25 years since we last did an exhibition on Charlotte,” the exhibition’s curator Justin McGuirk told the Telegraph, “and following a huge exhibition at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, which looked at the artistic world she inhabited, we realised it’d be a shame to let all of that energy dissipate. So it inspired us to work with the Perriand family to present her in a new light in London.
“In particular we were keen to show Perriand’s creative process and bring the design focus back to her, so we feature a lot of drawings that have never been seen before."
Perriand was a rare female in the 20th century male-dominated world of design. More than ‘just’ a furniture designer but unable to technically call herself an architect, she was perhaps most of all an interior architect, and designed from the inside out, as much concerned with storage solutions and using furniture as architectural elements as with the whole aesthetic.
This way of thinking culminated in the 20-year project to design and build Les Arcs. A project of such scale is of course collaborative, but the large team of architects, engineers, town planners, landscape designers and mountain guides was led by a 65-year-old woman, Perriand. “It just shows what a force of life she was,” says McGuirk.
Perriand was born in 1903 and raised in Paris, but her paternal grandparents lived in the Savoie region and she would visit them often. From an early age she loved being active, sporty and spending time in nature.
Instinctively a feminist, Perriand had first designed open-plan kitchens and living rooms in 1928 in Travail et Sport, as she did not want women to be shut away in a kitchen. She is quoted in the exhibition saying: “Better to spend a day in the sun than to spend it dusting our useless objects.”
“She was all about storage solutions,” says McGuirk. “Keep the space empty and go outside and play.”
Anyone who has stayed in one of Perriand’s apartments in Les Arcs will understand this concept. But the other significant feature of all the apartments is their view of the mountains.
“Her vision was to concentrate people into these buildings so the development doesn’t sprawl,” says McGuirk. “Perriand refers to the concept as ‘compressed’ – she wants to preserve the natural landscape as much as possible, and she wants everyone to have an unobstructed view of nature, so the rooms are arranged at particular angles so everyone’s looking away from the development, not at the development.”
But Les Arcs also draws on her belief that leisure, sport and travel should be accessible to all. In the mid 20th century, the notion of mass tourism was a utopian idea; that the emerging middle class now had free time and some disposable income and could travel and ski. “She really believed that people need to balance their working lives and their active leisure lives,” says McGuirk.
The developer Roger Godino shared this outlook, which is why they wanted maximum density apartments, and connects back to the ‘compressed’ idea. When you look at the buildings in Les Arcs, they’re nestled into the slopes and are not too intrusive, yet comfortably accommodate 30,000 people.
The Design Museum’s show also features details of a chalet Perriand designed and built for herself in Méribel in 1960, plus drawings and prototypes of little mountain refuges she first thought about in the 1930s. But it is Les Arcs that was to be the culmination of all her ideas, and is where she is most celebrated.
“Perriand was such a dynamic, independent spirit and a fully-fledged member of the avant-garde, but also a fun-loving social character who loved the outdoors and most of her architecture comes from her love of walking and skiing in the mountains.
“If one had to spend a year or more immersed in a designer’s life,” says McGuirk, “It’d be hard to find someone more fascinating and fun than Perriand.”
