Raised ground floor – La Maison de Verre

I’ve never seen it, but the images of the glowing walls of Pierre Charot’s glass house in Paris are stored in my brain. A found book was the reason we took a closer look.

In the window of the antiquarian bookstore, I saw the title of the book “Charo”. Yes, it’s the one with la Maison de Verre, that wonderful installation in the backyard of Paris that I had read about before. Buy, read. Pierre Charot, born in 1883, learned English furniture painting, which meant designing fixtures, was cleared to fight in World War I, came out unscathed, and founded his own design office in 1919. He married wealthy relatives, who were also enlightened and for whom he furnished their bourgeois apartments with the furniture of his design. Chareau associated with the moderns of the day such as Fernand Léger, Robert Mallet-Stevens, attended the first CIAM congress at La Sarraz and also at the founding of “L’Architecture d’Aujour’hui”. He brings together Modigliani, Braque, Juan Gris, Klee, Duffy, Max Ernst and Mondrian in short, he is a piece of the cake. He left France in 1940 and landed in New York, where he died in 1950. The book is in three languages, English, French and German, the German translation being sloppy. There are two chapters: Chareau’s Furniture and La Maison de Verre. The furniture, with all due respect, are bourgeois showpieces with upholstery and expensive wood, all quite bulky and most of them custom made for the bourgeois bedroom and living room. This might be exciting for design historians, I think it’s too tall a daughter and smells like a madam playing for her friends on the grand piano (Erard) in the evening. It is only when you compare this furniture with the usual dowry that a bride brought with her at the time that it becomes clear what was modern about Charot’s furniture. In contrast, the Maison de Verre, which was completed in 1931 after a long period of planning, is of a completely different modernity. It is a back building between the Cour et Jardin. The second-floor resident refused to move out, so Chareau tore up a finger and…