The Maison Christian Lacroix shop in Paris acts
as a background for Walckhoff’s imaginative cabinets, armchair, pouffe, and coffee tables, which are part of the Nouveaux Classiques collection for the international retailer Roche Bobois.
Christian Lacroix’s Creative Director Debuts a Sumptuous Furniture Line
Sacha Walckhoff's stunning pieces are now available through Roche Bobois
The creative director of Maison Christian Lacroix, Sacha Walckhoff, is visibly excited. He has just presented the first collection of furniture he designed for Roche Bobois, the French company that has 280 shops worldwide. “The collection will be in 80 of them,” said Walckhoff of Nouveaux Classiques.
Rodrigo Almeida, a designer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, created the one-of-a-kind innovative chaise-sofa. The embroidered and collaged pillows are by Walckhoff.
The multi-layered series of pieces includes shapely upholstered furniture, as well as striking cabinets that are decorated with blown-up versions of an antique engraving depicting monuments in the French town of Arles—which happens to be the famous French fashion designer Christian Lacroix’s birthplace. “I was totally free to do whatever I wanted,” added Walckhoff, who had worked with the Lacroix brand for 24 years—first with the designer himself, and for the past six years on his own, designing china, textiles, and pillows for a number of international brands, many of which are available through Maison Christian Lacroix.
Cover: The Maison Christian Lacroix shop in Paris acts
as a background for Walckhoff’s imaginative cabinets, armchair, pouffe, and coffee tables, which are part of the Nouveaux Classiques collection for the international retailer Roche Bobois.
For Roche Bobois, Walckhoff felt that he needed to have a very focused idea. “So,” he explained, “I locked myself up for a week and considered what a furniture collection made by a fashion house could look like.” The challenge was to marry the fanciful Lacroix style with the DNA of Roche Bobois: high quality, yet not an over-the top example of luxury. Walckhoff went back to the relationship between fashion and the decorative arts in the early 20th century in order to find the right note to suit and unite the two French companies. “I thought of Jacques Doucet and Eileen Gray, Jeanne Lanvin and Rateau, and also Yves Saint Laurent and Lalanne,” explained Walckhoff, listing some of the most admired modern masters of the past century.
The Maison Lacroix two-door cabinet is a 2016 design by Walckhoff, made by Roche Bobois. The back of the doors features a striped silk-print and the front depicts a detail from an old engraving.
“The lines are very 1960s, but the materials—rosewood and gold-plated brass—are very 30s,” he said of the series of lacquered cabinets in the Roche Bobois collection. “I picked up a few details from each decade,” observed Walckhoff, who grew up in Switzerland, studied fashion in Barcelona, Spain, and came to Paris to work for such fashion houses as Dorothée Bis, Michel Klein, and then Lacroix.
The inclusion of the enhanced antique engraving with the modern forms of the cabinets, and their beautifully lacquered surfaces—some with bold black and white stripes, a particularly striking 1970s touch—are exactly what Walckhoff strove for. He’s designed a link between past and present that helps build the future.
