Le Courcelles

No. 008

Double body Buffet de salon

Le Courcelles makes a bold argument through its soft and hypnotizing serpentine front. The bookmatched walnut burl follows the full undulating width without seam — a construction choice that demands more from the veneer, more from the craftsman, and announces its ambition before the doors are opened. When they are, the upper body reveals a fitted interior of considered purpose: glass shelving at center, a column of three drawers at right, a locking cabinet at left — the working architecture of a Parisian host who entertained with intention.

French atelier production, c. 1937
Art Déco tardif, the late phase, c. 1935–1938. By this point in the period, the angular severity of high Art Déco classique had relaxed into something warmer and more formally confident — serpentine fronts replacing straight cornices, walnut burl displacing the darker exotics (palissandre, macassar) that had dominated the peak years. The movement that Ruhlmann had defined through commissioned grandeur and Frank had countered through radical austerity had, by the mid-thirties, settled into a serious middle register: anonymous Parisian ateliers producing furniture for apartments in the 8th and 17th arrondissements where quality was assumed and craft was unremarkable.
Private Home of Paris suburb, À Viry-Châtillon. Acquired May 15th, 2026.
Authenticity professionally assessed.
Presque Studio
300 N. State Street, Chicago, USA
38.6 × 21.7 × 51.2 (inch)

Walnut burl veneer (noyer ranceux)

Bronze floral-medallion handle pulls

Ebonized Wood Structure

Studio imagery generated from photographs of the original piece. Provenance, dimensions, and condition are documented from the physical object.

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A thoughtful pairing...

The book.

Break of Day, Collete (1928)

The novel of a woman who decides, at fifty, to live entirely according to her own measure. Written in a voice so precise it reads as a letter rather than a fiction. Colette paid more sustained attention to objects than any other French writer of the period: the weight of a fabric, the smell of a room, the specific presence of furniture that has been lived with. Read in an armchair nearby, sipping over a freshly chilled Lillet - the evening is settled.

The record.

Mon Homme, Mistinguett (1937)

The chanson of Parisian composure — theatrical, slightly wounded, entirely controlled. Mistinguett sang at the Casino de Paris for thirty years; she was the voice of the interior, not the cabaret or the expatriate club. Mon homme is a song about holding oneself together with full theatrical conviction, which is precisely what a serpentine-front buffet in a 17th arrondissement salon does every evening it is opened.

The pour.

Lillet Blanc, Bordeaux (1872)

A chilled bottle retrieved from the lower cabinet, a glass taken from the fitted interior shelf, the pour made standing at the piece itself. Lillet is a Bordeaux-based aromatized wine produced since 1872, the drink of serious Parisian entertaining throughout the interwar period: lighter than Suze, less bitter, more assured. The pour of a host who has already decided the evening will go well. Le Courcelles was built for exactly this moment — doors open, bottles visible, guests not yet seated.

The art.

Trois filles à marier, Roger Bissière (1923)

Three figures, oil on canvas, from the years Bissière was teaching at the Académie Ranson and working through what French painting could do between Cubism and something quieter. The painting shares Le Courcelles's register — not avant-garde, not academic, but formally serious in a way that doesn't announce itself. Three women standing for a social occasion, painted by someone who understood that the occasion was secondary to how the figures held themselves in a room. The right thing to hang above a buffet that was itself made for social occasions without being defined by them.