WFrench furniture comprises both the most sophisticated furniture made in Paris for king and court, aristocrats and rich upper bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and French provincial furniture made in the provincial cities and towns many of which, like Lyon and Liège, retained cultural identities distinct from the metropolis. There was also a conservative artisanal rural tradition of French country furniture which remained unbroken until the advent of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century.
WJacques Adnet was a French art deco modernist designer, architect and interior designer.
WFrançois-Émile André was a French architect, artist, and furniture designer. He was the son of the architect of Charles André and the father of two other architects, Jacques and Michel André.
WJean Avisse produced chairs, sofas, chaises and similar furniture in 18th century France.
WFrançois-Rupert Carabin was a French cabinetmaker, photographer and sculptor. His work was representative of the Art Nouveau style.
WGilles-Paul Cauvet was a French ornamental sculptor and cabinet-maker. Born in Aix-en-Provence, he took part in the furnishing of the Palais-Royal in Paris and designed furniture in Louis XVI style.
WPierre Chapo, born in Paris, was a French furniture designer and craftsman.
WPhilippe Charbonneaux (1917–1998) was a French industrial designer, best known for automobile and truck design, but also known for other products such as television sets. Many of his works are now exhibited in places such as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, or Museum of Modern Art in New York. He specialised in car design studies, so he has left many inventive prototypes. The Ellipsis concept car, released just two years prior to his death, is still very fresh and modern. He designed for Renault, Ford, Delahaye, Berliet, Bugatti, and others.
WJean Dunand (1877–1942) was a Swiss and French painter, sculptor, metal craftsman and interior designer during the Art Deco period. He was particularly known for his lacquered screens and other art objects.
WRené Gabriel was a French decorative artist and designer who specialized in furniture series . He had a clean, logical style that inspired many of the new designers in the years after World War II (1939–45). The prestigious Prix René Gabriel continues to be awarded to French designers for modern designs that can be mass-produced.
WPierre Golle was an influential Parisian ébéniste, of Dutch extraction.
WAndré Groult was a French decorator and furniture designer., and one of the most prominent figures of the Art Deco style. His work featured curving and organic shapes, and extremely rich materials. His work has been described as compromising between tradition and modernism. For the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925, he designed a woman's bedchamber with a pink and gray palette. The room featured tended walls of Soie stitching. The furniture in the room was rounded and covered in natural Galuchat.
WJacques HitIer was a French interior architect and designer. In his book, Patrick Favardin introduces him as “one of the most prominent figures of decorative art of the second half of the twentieth century”. He was also a director of the Paris L'École Boulle, School for Fine Arts and Crafts and Applied Arts, from 1972 to 1982.
WFrançois-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter (1770–1841) oversaw one of the most successful and influential furniture workshops in Paris, from 1796 to 1825. The son of Georges Jacob, an outstanding chairmaker who worked in the Louis XVI style and Directoire styles of the earlier phase of Neoclassicism and executed many royal commissions, Jacob-Desmalter, in partnership with his older brother, assumed the family workshop in 1796. Freed from the Parisian guild restrictions of the Ancien Régime, the workshop was now able to produce veneered case-pieces (ébénisterie) in addition to turned and carved seat furniture (menuiserie). When his brother died, Jacob-Desmalter drew his father from retirement and began to develop one of the largest furniture workshops in Napoleonic Paris.
WGeorges Jacob was one of the two most prominent Parisian master menuisiers. He produced carved, painted and gilded beds and seat furniture and upholstery work for the French royal châteaux, in the Neoclassical style that is associated with Louis XVI furniture.
WJacques Jarrige is a French sculptor and designer, born December 1962 in Paris, France to a family of art collectors and scientists. His work is known for its fluid organic forms which are hand wrought from simple materials.
WCharles-Honoré Lannuier, French cabinetmaker (1779–1819), lived and worked in New York City. In Lannuier's time, the style of his furniture was described as "French Antique." Today his work is classified primarily as Federal furniture, Neoclassical, or American Empire.
WJean-Pierre Latz was one of the handful of truly outstanding cabinetmakers (ébénistes) working in Paris in the mid-18th century. Like several of his peers in the French capital, he was of German origin. His furniture is in a fully developed rococo style, employing boldly sculptural gilt-bronze mounts complementing marquetry motifs of flowers and leafy sprays, in figured tropical veneers like tulipwood, amarante, purpleheart and rosewood, often featuring the distinctive end-grain cuts. He also produced lacquered pieces, most famously the slant-front desk in the collection of Stavros Niarchos, Paris.
WCharles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America.
WJean-François Leleu was a leading French furniture-maker (ébéniste) of the eighteenth century.
WFrançois Linke (1855–1946) was a leading Parisian ébéniste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
WFernand Maillaud (1862-1948) was a French painter, illustrator, ébéniste and tapestry designer.
WAuguste Majorelle was a French art dealer, decorator, ceramicist and cabinet-maker, who established the Atelier d’Art de Decoration in Nancy, France. His son, Louis Majorelle, became one of the earliest modernist cabinet-makers and his grand-son, Jacques Majorelle, was a noted modernist-Orientalist painter.
WLouis-Jean-Sylvestre Majorelle, usually known simply as Louis Majorelle, was a French decorator and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs, in the French tradition of the ébéniste. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in the Art Nouveau style, and after 1901 formally served as one of the vice-presidents of the École de Nancy.
WDaniel Marot or Daniel Marot the Elder (1661–1752) was a French-born Dutch architect, furniture designer and engraver at the forefront of the classicizing Late Baroque Louis XIV style. He worked for a long time in England and the Dutch Republic, where he was naturalised in 1709.
WJean-Marie Massaud is a French architect, inventor and designer. He was born in Toulouse, France in 1966.
WJuste-Aurèle Meissonier was a French goldsmith, sculptor, painter, architect, and furniture designer.
WCharlotte Perriand was a French architect and designer. Her work aimed to create functional living spaces in the belief that better design helps in creating a better society. In her article "L'Art de Vivre" from 1981 she states "The extension of the art of dwelling is the art of living — living in harmony with man's deepest drives and with his adopted or fabricated environment." Charlotte liked to take her time in a space before starting the design process. In Perriand's Autobiography, "Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation", she states: "I like being alone when I visit a country or historic site. I like being bathed in its atmosphere, feeling in direct contact with the place without the intrusion of a third party." Her approach to design includes taking in the site and appreciating it for what it is. Perriand felt she connected with any site she was working with or just visiting she enjoyed the living things and would reminisce on a site that was presumed dead.
WArmand-Albert Rateau (1882–1938) was a French furniture maker and interior designer. In 2006, The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts characterized him as "the most eminent of the ensembliers, the high-style designer-decorators" who worked with luxury materials for the socially elite. In 2012, Architectural Digest described him as "one of the most exclusive interior designers of the 1920s." Two of his more notable achievements are the bronze furniture of his manufacture and the designs he assembled in decorating the apartment of Jeanne Lanvin.
WPierre Renart is a French designer and cabinetmaker, who studied carpentry at the École Boulle in Paris. Among his best-known designs are the Genesis and Ribbon Collections.
WJean-Henri Riesener was a famous German ébéniste (cabinetmaker), working in Paris, whose work exemplified the early neoclassical "Louis XVI style".
WBernard II van Risamburgh, sometimes Risen Burgh was a Parisian ébéniste of Dutch and French extraction, one of the outstanding cabinetmakers working in the Rococo style. "Bernard II's furniture is brilliant in almost every respect. His carcasses are beautifully shaped, his mounts and marquetry are always in complete balance even when extremely elaborate, and there is a logic to his works that allows the eye to comprehend them effortlessly," wrote Ted Dell.
WAlexander Roux (1813–1886) was a French-trained ébéniste, or cabinetmaker, who emigrated to the United States in the 1830s. He opened a shop in New York City in 1837. The business grew quickly: by the 1850s he employed 120 craftsmen in his shop and introduced then-new industrial technologies, such as steam-powered saws.
WÉmile-Jacques Ruhlmann, , was a French furniture designer and interior decorator, who was one of the most important figures in the Art Deco movement. His furniture featured sleek designs, expensive and exotic materials and extremely fine craftsmanship, and became a symbol of the luxury and modernity of Art Deco. It also produced a reaction from other designers and architects, such as Le Corbusier, who called for simpler, functional furniture.
WEugène Vallin was a French furniture designer and manufacturer, as well as an architect.
WAdam Weisweiler was a pre-eminent French master cabinetmaker (ébéniste) in the Louis XVI period, working in Paris.