Hasta La Ideas

News: French interior and product designer Andrée Putman has died in Paris aged 87.

Putman’s career spanned more than four decades and she was actively designing well into her eighties. She embarked on her design career relatively late, when she was in her fifties, and set up her design company, Studio Putman, in 1997. The studio’s output included everything from interiors, furniture, fashion accessories and rugs.

With her 1984 interior for Ian Schrager’s Morgans Hotel in New York, Putman was credited with designing the first boutique hotel. Her career then took off: “Because I started working in New York, the French suddenly asked for me,” she said.

She was also instrumental in rediscovering the work of designers including Eileen Gray, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Mariano Fortuny, launching Ecart International in the eighties to manufacture and market modern classics by these and other previously forgotten talents.

She specified a metal stacking chair designed by Mallet-Stevens in 1928  for the Morgans Hotel and in 2009 worked with furniture brand Emeco to create a contemporary version of the chair from aluminium. Called Morgans, the chair was developed exclusively for the hotel it is named after.

Putman worked on projects ranging from movie sets for Peter Greenaway to Concorde interiors for Air France. Her recent product design included silverware and jewellery for Christofle, a champagne cooler for Veuve Clicquot and a reinterpretation of the Louis Vuitton steamer bag.

Recent interiors by Putman include the Guerlain flagship store on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, stores for Anne Fontaine in Tokyo, Paris and New York and private residences around the world. in Dublin, Miami, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Tel Aviv and Tangiers.

In 2007 Putman’s daughter, Olivia, took over the reins of Studio Putman.

Andrée Putman was born in Paris on December 23, 1925, and died in the same city on 19 January 2013.

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