The taste conversation has become really crowded lately. There are professionals to help you cultivate it. We have algorithms that spoon-feed you versions of it. We now have an endless supply of beautifully photographed interiors to reassure us that our taste is developing in the right direction. Never has individuality been so enthusiastically encouraged, while at the same time being so efficiently mass-produced. Alexandre Ligios would like us to loosen up a little.
The French furniture designer has made a career out of following ideas that people can easily dismiss as a fad or being too Passé. He has sofas and chairs that resemble clouds; his armchairs look like well-fed cartoon characters, side tables like jigsaw puzzles, and one of his coffee tables owes its existence to a kid stacking and playing with dominoes on the floor. Ligios's work is exuberant. You can't look at his pieces and not feel a sense of whimsical freedom. Once that captivates you, you're compelled to believe that furniture doesn't always have to express itself with the solemnity of architecture or the rigidity of what's trending. "I would rather not produce a piece at all than transform it to the point where it no longer looks like me," he says of working with manufacturers, which says a lot coming from someone who didn't want to become a furniture designer in the first place.
Alexandre Ligios Didn't Plan on Becoming a Furniture Designer
Around 2020, Ligios was living in France and planning to open a shop devoted to lesser-known furniture brands. The pandemic said otherwise; the venture dissolved, and he left Marseille for Morocco with an increasingly persistent suspicion that maybe he should just make the furniture himself. By then, he'd lived in Corsica, Marseille, and Paris. His childhood home in Corsica was surrounded by fruit trees and gardens, and his grandmother favored carved wooden furniture and traditional interiors. If we try, I'm sure we can come up with an elegant theory about Mediterranean landscapes and the origins of the silhouettes he visits often in his designs. But "My aesthetic language was built elsewhere, and later," says Ligios.
He speaks with more affection about his grandfather, who, despite having no formal education, learned to construct apartment buildings and villas through hard-earned experience. Some of those spaces were built on difficult and rocky terrain. Ligios also followed the unconventional route and, with the same courage as his grandfather, pursued furniture design in a similar fashion.
Morocco Taught Him That Good Design Takes a Little Patience
Marrakech, where his first collections took shape, offered Ligios access to artisans who understood how to make things, including things that had never been made quite the way he wanted them to be made before. In these special workshops, he encountered techniques accumulated across generations. "When I look back six years, I see an enormous number of mistakes," he admits, recalling challenges with design, production, and export early on. "It was those artisans in particular that taught me patience, but also how to understand the reality of a material and what it does and doesn't allow."
There's something wonderfully inconvenient about the reality of a material. An idea in our mind is perfect as a finished product. The idea expressed as a drawing offers almost unlimited freedom. But the physical reality of the material adds gravity back to the equation. Wood has grain. Fabric stretches, can catch pet hair, can stain. Curves need support. Manufacturing schedules aren't always walking in lock stop with artistic revelation. Life is anything but perfect. Quality materials keeps us sober to this fact. A manufacturer might suggest simplifying a curve, changing an assembly, or adjusting a proportion to accommodate existing production methods. Perfectly reasonable proposals on their own. Collectively though, they can leave a designer staring at something that has become more sensible and considerably less interesting.
And yet, some of Ligios best work emerged when he allowed others into the more intimate recesses of his creative process. "I sometimes draw pieces that will never be released. I think that is quite natural when you create. When an idea does come to me, though, the piece is often immediately obvious in my head. I visualize it, I draw it, then I work out how to build it technically..." His Teddy armchair, for example, evolved substantially through experimentation with the artisans in Morocco. "We tried things, modified them, searched together until we arrived at the final armchair," Ligios tells us. "It's a piece born of a much freer and more collective process than usual, and in the end it has been enormously successful."
Good Furniture Doesn't Need to Tell You How to Live
Ligios is comfortable with the geographical liberties his work takes over time. "A piece of furniture can be born of an American imaginary, be drawn by a Frenchman, come to life thanks to the experience of Moroccan artisans, and then be produced tomorrow in Portugal or somewhere else." He holds the kind of cosmopolitan view of authorship that our design industry sometimes fails to live up to when it treats provenance as a certificate of aesthetic legitimacy. Ligios isn't pretentious about his pieces. He himself is quick to rearrange his own furniture, and would prefer that someone who owns one of his pieces would discover for themselves how it should fit inside their home. "I think it is up to us to give a piece of furniture its role," he says. Maybe the piece commands a room like a sculpture, or maybe it recedes into its surroundings. That decision belongs solely to the person who has to live with it.
There's a beautiful simplicity to Ligios and his work. There's no grand manifesto, no strict adherence to some collection of historical references, no elaborate intellectual arguments to try and justify his decision-making. Ligios is an explorer who connects his adventures and the relationships he makes into a language that expresses itself as side tables, sofas, and different pieces of furniture. He is the epitome of Le Flâneur, the open-minded explorer and creator who finds poetry in everyday life. For all of his insistence on authorship, Ligios's real provocation may be the freedom he assumes people should have when choosing their furniture and how it lives in their spaces.
This interview with French furniture designer Alexandre Ligios explores his creative philosophy, unconventional journey into furniture design, and collaborations with artisans in Morocco. The conversation accompanies the launch of LE FLÂNEUR, a 21-piece furniture collection designed by Ligios in collaboration with Residence Supply. The collection marks a new chapter for Residence Supply as both a platform and patron for independent artists and designers. All designs and creative works featured are attributed to Alexandre Ligios. Any third-party imagery remains the property of its respective copyright holders.
