Bottega Veneta, led by the very thoughtful and ridiculously talented Matthieu Blazy, is launching its new collaboration with Italian furniture company Cassina. It is an homage to Le Corbusier’s LC14 Tabouret Cabanon stool or side table—a tribute blessed by the Fondation Le Corbusier—and it will be celebrated at Milan’s Salone del Mobile design week with an installation entitled “On The Rocks.” (Expect this to be all you see scrolling on Instagram in the coming days.) For Blazy, it’s the kind of project he relishes: a moment to, as he puts it, “create a dialogue beyond the context of fashion. And it’s also a way to celebrate craft as a timeless technology that can shape so many aspects of our every day, whether it’s the clothes we put on in the morning, the bag we carry our belongings in, or the desk we sit at during the workday.”
It’s not the first time the two houses have worked together, previously crafting seating inspired by Mario Bellini’s model 932 Quartet sofas made for Bottega Veneta’s store in Zurich. Yet those blessed with gimlet eyes will recognize that their latest joint labor of love was already unveiled (well, one version was, at least) at Bottega’s fall 2024 show, where it was used as seating for the audience. Then the LC14 Tabouret, which resembles a beautifully crafted packing crate, its humble functionality contrasted by exquisite carpentry—dovetail joints and all—was at Blazy’s intervention, striated with scorch marks, inspired by a centuries-old Japanese technique. (Blazy’s own Tabouret, in plain wood, sits beside his bed in Milan.)
At “On The Rocks,” Blazy and Bottega Veneta will also reveal what happens when you encase the LC14 Tabouret in the house’s trademark Intreccio foulard technique—and then color that woven leather in hues that really sing, like red, yellow, turquoise-y blue, and a shade the house calls raintree green. Then—yes, there’s another then—it’s painted over in black, creating a beguiling and strange interplay between color, non-color, and craft. All of the leather work was done at Bottega’s workshops in Montebello, near Vicenza, in Italy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the level of workmanship involved here, this is all very limited edition: 100 of the scorched wood, 60 total of the woven leather. (Don’t even ask me about the cost. I didn’t dare enquire. I want one of the raintree green leather ones so badly, but I don’t have a spare kidney handy.)
What really emerges with all this wonderful experimentation is that no matter what you do to the LC14 Tabouret—burn it, cover it in leather, apply joyous color—its essential economy of line, its durability, and its unadorned practicality remain unchanged. That’s fitting, given—quick backstory here—the origins of the piece. Le Corbusier found it as a Scottish whisky crate washed up on the beach near his tiny experimental Cabanon home at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur in France; modernists back in the day loved nothing more than to see what could be done to make small living spaces comfortably habitable. (Says Blazy: “I find it fascinating that Le Corbusier chose for his own home this fisherman-style cabin, built by traditional carpenters. Despite his famous remark about a house being a ‘machine for living in’ he was drawn towards something pure, simple, tactile, hand-crafted.”) Le Corbusier then reworked his found object in 1952 into a new version. The rest is, quite literally, history.
One can only imagine that for Blazy the LC14 Tabouret particularly resonates because he’s a designer whose own work references the everyday elevated and enriched by craft techniques, and whose collections and shows have compelled because of their mix of the romanticism of travel and worldliness, and, at the same time, the conceptualizing of time, motion, and movement. What evokes that more than the LC14 Tabouret, with its somewhat mysterious origins and its subsequent reimagination as part of Le Corbusier’s vision of how we might all live? Blazy readily agrees. “In the postwar period, you see this deep commitment to functional living spaces, that are nevertheless expressive and suggestive of possibilities,” he says. “That inspires me in my work at Bottega Veneta. As a house specializing in bags and leather goods, we have a design heritage that is deeply pragmatic, and at the same time gestures to imagination and adventure.”