What’s in a Name? For These Design Brands, Generations of Expectations.

This article is a part of our Design particular part about new interpretations of vintage design kinds.

Tabloid newspapers and tv dramas have sharpened our appetites for horror tales about household companies, of Machiavellian dad and mom seated on the thrones of their capitalist empires manipulating their power-mad youngsters like chess pawns.

While there has but to be a legacy design firm that would prop up a TV present like “Succession,” many grapple with the switch of authority to youthful generations. Those who inherit the mantle should face a digital, environmentally challenged, globally knitted future, the likes of which their forebears might hardly have envisioned.

Ligne Roset

In March, Antoine and Olivier Roset have been named co-chief executives of Roset SAS, a mum or dad firm of the French furnishings model Ligne Roset. Founded in 1860 by an earlier Antoine Roset, Ligne Roset started as a producer of strolling sticks and umbrellas. Its present leaders are first cousins and great-great-grandsons of the eponymous founder.

Antoine, 43, joined in 2006 as an government vice chairman overseeing Ligne Roset’s North American division. Olivier, 42, arrived two years later because the director of finance and common director. Both now work on the firm’s headquarters in Briord, France.

Ligne Roset has lengthy collaborated with rising designers, and the pair considers placing cash into gear to assist new design a vital part for transferring ahead. “It is key for a manufacturer who wants to be at the forefront of design and development,” Antoine stated. Olivier identified that an organization may give carte blanche to visionary designers solely whether it is geared up with the expertise to supply what they dream up.

In collaboration with a California biotechnology firm known as MycoWorks, the cousins are creating a brand new kind of vegan leather-based comprised of mushrooms. Other corporations are experimenting with alternate options to hides, they famous, however Ligne Roset needs to be the primary to have a sustainable vegan leather-based on everlasting provide of their merchandise.

At the identical time, the Rosets are revisiting furnishings perennials, like Togo, a low, cocoon-like couch designed 50 years in the past by Michel Ducaroy. There is even a podcast about its growth.

Maison Leleu

Alexia Leleu, 38, needs to return her household’s enterprise to its former glory, which was abruptly interrupted 50 years in the past. The Paris design home, based in 1910 by her great-grandfather Jules Leleu, was identified for limited-edition furnishings, rugs and lighting. Commissioned in 1969 by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, to create an set up for the two,five hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire, Maison Leleu spent three years making 51 tents for the occasion. But the shah by no means paid the invoice, supposedly due to the brewing revolution in Iran, and the enterprise was compelled to shut in 1973 to keep away from chapter.

Six years in the past, Ms. Leleu, who initially labored within the pharmaceutical trade, found {that a} former secretary at Maison Leleu, Françoise Siriex, had stored a big library of drawings of the design home’s furnishings and lighting, colour illustrations of materials, wallpapers and rugs, and images.

“At this moment, I decided to bring Maison Leleu back to life,” she stated. Having studied artwork and furnishings historical past at Ecole Boulle, the Parisian school of advantageous and utilized arts, she needed to honor her household’s legacy, however she didn’t wish to merely reissue previous items.

Ms. Leleu confronted some hurdles (“It wasn’t easy to convince 40 rights holders to give me the chance to continue the family adventure,” she stated). She is personally financing the enterprise. “Naturally, I opened the doors to other family members who wanted to join me in writing this new chapter,” she stated. “However, no one at the time wanted to take such a risk.” To diversify, Ms. Leleu is learning to be an inside designer “and offer a global package,” she stated, and she or he launched her personal line of furnishings and rugs. “It is the next step. I’m a very confident person. I trust my DNA.”

Loretta Caponi

Guido Caponi, 35, is the chief working officer of Loretta Caponi, a Florentine atelier based by and named for his grandmother. (His mom, Lucia Caponi, is chief government.)

Since 1967, the corporate has produced beautiful hand-embroidered family linens and lingerie. Mr. Caponi studied legislation on the University of Florence and took a spot 12 months to work the area’s vineyards and farmhouses, however he additionally spent a number of time within the firm’s archives, meaning to assume a job within the enterprise someday. It has at all times had “something very special, something unique inside,” he stated. “What I’m trying to do is just let the other people see what I see.”

Mr. Caponi is trying into the gap, too. He stated he hopes to make Loretta Caponi extra worldwide, digitize sure inner operations and develop manufacturing with out altering the textiles’ identification and high quality. And whereas these maneuvers would require extra artisans, for now, none of them dwell farther than 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from Florence, and the work continues to be all completed by hand. The firm now has greater than 50 sellers worldwide, and in June, it added its first shop-in-shop at Harrods in London.

“Our next dream would be to open a store in the U.S., for sure,” Mr. Caponi stated. “But it will take time to do so.” For now, Loretta Caponi is that includes its linens on Abask, a brand new web site by the founding father of the clothes retailer Matches.

Wengler

Karen Wengler, 38, is reviving her household’s rattan enterprise in Copenhagen, which has lain dormant for many years. Founded by her German-born great-great-grandfather Robert Wengler in 1850, the corporate initially offered housewares. The growth of leisure tradition on the finish of the nineteenth century opened a marketplace for yard, seaside and resort furnishings. “They didn’t get tans at the time so they sat under umbrellas on wicker furniture,” Ms. Wengler stated.

Robert Wengler went on to make items for the Danish royal household and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, in addition to peculiar people. The firm “perfected the way wicker furniture was produced and were considered the standard,” Ms. Wengler stated. As rattan advanced with the occasions, it labored with Danish modernists like Arne Jacobsen and Nanna Ditzel. (Ms. Ditzel’s 1959 Egg chair, designed along with her husband, Jorgen Ditzel, turned certainly one of its most-loved items.) But it floundered on the shortage of a successor when Ms. Wengler’s grandfather selected to pursue a medical profession reasonably than take over the household operation.

Ms. Wengler mixes the talents of her forebears. She holds a grasp’s diploma in enterprise and started her profession doing product growth at pharmaceutical and medical expertise corporations. In partnership with the Danish-American firm Form she has revived a number of Wengler items, together with two offered by CB2: a lounge chair designed in 1945 and a chaise from 1955. Additional items from the archives will likely be obtainable later this 12 months via the Scandinavian lifestyle model Dansk.

Etel

An ambassador of Brazilian design, the São Paulo firm, based by Etel Carmona in 1985, not solely has created new furnishings items but in addition helped to protect the nation’s cultural historical past. In 1995, it made an infinite impression when it launched 50 items on the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, in New York, and didn’t look again.

Lissa Carmona, Etel’s daughter, had been educated in finance, however modified course, immersed herself in design and went on to turn into the corporate’s chief government in 2008. In addition to items by her mom, the gathering now contains works by Oscar Niemeyer, Oswaldo Bratke and Jorge Zalszupin. Last 12 months, Ms. Carmona honored Mr. Zalszupin, a Polish-Brazilian designer and architect, by making a museum of his work in his former residence in São Paulo.