Is Jean-Michel Frank’s Super Simple, Century-Old Seat the GOAT of Chairs?

After the French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau visited the Left Bank apartment of the Parisian It decorator Jean-Michel Frank in the early 1920s, he was overheard delivering a playfully savage review: “This fellow is charming. Very charming, really. What a shame he’s been burglarized.” We can infer he was referencing Frank’s utterly minimalistic living quarters, stripped of artworks, moldings, and most furniture, a look that his client François Mauriac would dub the “strange luxury of nothingness.”What little furniture Frank did use in his own home and in those of his daring clientele followed a similar ethos, which some speculate was his extreme spin on the streamlined 18th-century furniture of Louis XVI, undergoing a resurgence at the time. One of his earliest designs, conceived in 1923, was the upholstered back armchair—a blocky perch with beveled feet, produced by his go-to cabinetmaker Adolphe Chanaux in oak and sheathed in shearling, leather, or wool. He placed it in the Paris salon of arts patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles as well as the San Francisco penthouse of American scion Charles Templeton Crocker. But you might not pay it much notice—it practically disappears in its simplicity.The upholstered-back armchair in the San Francisco penthouse he designed for Charles Templeton Crocker, circa 1929 Photo: Harald GottschalkA pair in Neal Beckstedt's Sag Harbor beach house Photo: Stephen Kent JohnsonThe chair by Ecart Photo: Courtesy of Ecart“The style is so sharp—at the end there’s actually no style, which is what makes it so timeless,” says AD100 interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch, who gets some revenue from that enduring appeal since acquiring Ecart in 2024, a brand that has reissued the furniture of Frank and others since Andrée Putman (see page 128) created it in 1978. This month, Ecart’s new Paris gallery will showcase a suite of important Frank designs including this one, of which Yovanovitch explains, “Every time we put one in the window people stop, come in, and say, ‘What is that?’”Interior designers have long been under that same spell. “On a comfort scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 20,” says AD100 designer Neal Beckstedt, who snapped up a pair at auction years back and wrapped them in casual blue linen for his Sag Harbor beach house. “Perfect proportions; perfect comfort—it’s the GOAT of chairs.”This story appears in the September issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.