The Emilieu studio is the designer of the new Camondo school in Toulon, the interior design school of the Arts-Décoratifs de Paris. The studio innovates and designs the whole school to measure, with equipment 100% eco-designed, modular and movable. From this project was born a series of unique pieces of furniture, the Servant Camondo. These massive pieces of furniture, designed to be easily moved, fulfill their traditional function of storing materials, decorating the room, and dividing the space. But their innovative design also opens up a room within the room, reversing the usual notion of serving space and space served. The large volume interior, once deployed, opens up the extent of its modularity.
The design of the furniture allows it to be transformed into a bookcase, a workshop (the plywood is waterproof and reacts to felt-tip pens like a whiteboard), a mini photo studio, an imaginary world… or simply a cabinet. Each piece of furniture, with its fake stone facade, is immediately identifiable: to each Camondo Servant, a specific interior organization is chosen by the user, knowing no limit but his imagination. These large pieces of furniture in reused maritime plywood are each hand-painted by a decorative painter, imitating the noble marbles of the Var region. Emilieu Studio upcycles surfaces deemed useless and skills deemed obsolete, each piece requiring over 30 hours of specialized carpentry and trompe l’oeil painting.
Isn’t the best way to respect the raw material to revalue materials and know-how against a disastrous extractivism, especially for the marble trade that is causing social and environmental devastation? The Camondo Servants demonstrate through the hybridization of artisanal techniques that it is not essential to extract overexploited materials to create exclusive furniture of the highest quality. The rehabilitation of the know-how of forgery, far from “denaturing” the reality of the material, rather questions our relationship to nature.
More to know on the studio’s website or Instagram account.
