Benjamin Paulin: Founder of Paulin Paulin Paulin – “The Dune” Sofa, Design Lineage, & Reimagining Everyday Form

0:00Every drop of Jack Daniels is mellowed through sugar maple charcoal, giving Jack its smooth taste. that's what makes Jack, Jack. Please drink responsibly. Jack Daniels and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40 % alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery Lynchburg, Tennessee. Is this the first podcast you film in here? I think I never did a podcast. No way. No. I'm not a podcast addict but I'm glad to discover it with you. I'm so honored to discover it with me. It's such an honor. I mean the first time I came here was two months ago. Yeah. And I've been a big fan of your work for a long time.

0:33Thank you. And a big fan of your content on social media. Yeah, we're also a fan of your work. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you. And seeing this in real life, I was just so shocked, especially because nothing I'd seen on your account was still here because you change everything in your home and studio. Yeah, we always change the atmosphere of the house. We like to make exhibitions that are actually changing our life. So this exhibition is what I call an exhibition, but it's actually we transform the house into a recording studio. so now we have every day people coming out and in like recording songs and we are becoming slowly but surely a music label wow this is a exhibition can change our life so you know we did just before we did an exhibition on tables so the idea was to showcase some tables of my father from the 50s to the 90s and now we are in the process of working on the project of a restaurant yeah so exhibition becoming something in real life after yeah it's not just an exhibition it's like it's amazing yeah and today it's music today it's music i love it it's really really cool around the world with your host the stard guy we welcome you back to the stard guy podcast sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just know.

1:56Well, Benjamin, it's such a great pleasure to have you here. Merci. On the Stade Guy podcast. Welcome. Benjamin Polin, the son of Pierre Polin. Yep. Iconic furniture designer and artist. And you are extending and sharing the legacy through Polin, Polin, Polin, which echoes through time and space. Yeah, actually, Polin, Polin, Polin is really the echo of Pierre Polin. When I started, like, a journalist was coming to me and asking me, like, oh, can we do like a tribute or homage to Pierre Paulin? And I was always sad that we are putting lights on a dead man instead of a living oeuvre. So the idea of Paulin, Paulin, Paulin was to talk about living experience, equal to his work, but not about like someone who is not there anymore.

2:47because this is the way I think he would have been interested of talking about him and his work. Yeah, I love that. It's really beautiful. The first time I came here, I noticed your kids were a part of the art. No, for sure. Because you live in... It's a permanent crash test. So we have like a lot of people are asking, oh, I want to buy this sofa that isn't it too white for the kids? Like, you know, trust me, we are testing. Exactly. Was that the same thing for you growing up with your father's workaround? Exactly. And I'm super glad that they have this experience, like my daughters, like my three daughters, they can have this experience of, I mean, amazing or format design pieces that you can experience and enjoy, because this is really the way I grew up with like the prototypes of my father, meaning the pieces that nobody never really saw except me, my family, friends of my father's.

3:44But this was like the impossible pieces for the industrial development. So the pieces we are now producing were the pieces that were at some point rejected in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. And so we are giving life to the dream that never came true. I love that. How did your father start his passion for furniture design and art? So my father initially wanted to be a sculptor. Did I tell you my father was half Swiss German? No. So his mother was from Lucerne. Okay. Yeah. So, and funny fact, but my father, I think, only went to Switzerland when he was as a kid, like maybe once or twice. But he built his character thinking he was Swiss.

4:38Like he always in his mind was like a Swiss German. And it helped him to build his aesthetic, his way of working and everything. Like it was a very important thing for him. In terms of his values. Yeah, exactly. And after he passed, like before, sorry, he passed, he asked me like when I passed, I want you to take my ashes to the Montriggi in Switzerland. So I went to the Montriggi after he passed to. Wow. do it. So it was like Switzerland was an image and something that made him very strong. Amazing. Can you describe some of those values that you observed in your father? He was a very hard worker and he was always like very chevaleresque, you know, in the sense that it was all about dignity, all about, he was not a lazy man interested by money or interested by fame or it was like he wanted to be useful, to be useful for the society.

5:39It's a very old school way of seeing the world. But I think when you leave a complicated moment like Second World War as a teenager, as it was, it changed your appreciation. And France, for example, was like a very dark country after the World War II. So everything needed to be rebuilt. So it was like a mission for this generation to make a better world. It was real. It was really what was happening. Wow. I love that you talk about useful because art by its very nature is often useless and meant to bring beauty to things without necessary use. But your father's chosen art form is incredibly useful.

6:28And actually you bring use out of every corner of every room that I've noticed, like the room we're sitting in now, Dune. There's, you could probably fit 50 people in here and any other furniture design would allow maybe 10. So there's so much use in this. I like the, I like the, the Dune model is like a sort of a jailbreaker for the sitting position. because you can sit many ways. You don't have a regular chair or sofa. You have only one or two ways to sit, and that's all. Here you can do whatever you want. This is what I like with this piece and some others. But yeah, so functionality, as you said, it was something important for my father.

7:12So I think he started, he wanted to be a sculptor initially, but he had a bad accident, so his hand was half-paralyzed. So he had to quit the ambition of being a sculptor. And then he was influenced by two of his uncles. So one was the sculptor, the Swiss-German uncle, like Freddy Stoll. And the other uncle was a car designer, an autodidact car designer. He designed some of the beautiful models for Rolls-Royce or Bentley, like some model on the people beach in the 30s, 40s. He designed it. He invented the opening roof for the Peugeot d 'Arlemat at the time. And so, Georges Paulin. And so, I think my father was influenced by both of them.

7:56One for the sculptural shape and the other one for the technical and points. And so, he kind of assembled those two visions and became a designer with this intention, like the sculptural intention and functional and technical intention. So, he united both of those influences. And this is what made him, actually. And my father was always saying about art, like we are not creating. We are just discovering. We are just seeing things that already exist. And we are assembling things. And what we call creation is actually discoveries. And somehow, I think he just saw what was in front of him and assembled it and made something new with this.

8:41But this was not new. This was meant to be. I love that. Somehow. And also, it was always making a very clear difference between art and design. It was always saying that an artist has to be a wolf. He has to obey to no rules. He's alone in front of everybody and is like presenting something that doesn't have to be nice, doesn't have to be accepted, doesn't have to be understood. A designer has to be a dog because he has to serve. He has to bring you like something like comfort, being nice, some functionalities actually. And function is the dog and art is the wolf. And so in his mind at the time, you cannot pretend being a wolf when you're actually a dog.

9:34So you're serving, you're improving life. But he was very proud of it. so he was not presenting him as an artist because he was thinking he was serving people not like an artist shouldn't serve yeah but now the world changed a lot so i think we could be tempted to say that now a lot of artists are serving yeah for sure yeah so so maybe maybe this is an old vision maybe not i don't know i mean i think that contradiction is very rare to have in one person's mind like if you just think of most businesses the function side is usually always asking the artistic side to be more realistic yeah and the artistic side is asking the function come on i'm sure we can build this construction to tech businesses whatever it is there's always that push and pull but every once in a while you find the greats of our of our generations who have that internal dilemma of function and aesthetic or artwork within their own minds.

10:34Yeah, for sure. And somewhere in that gray and that nuance, you get this beauty. I think my father was all about this duality in his own mind, because if you would have told him you were an artist, he would have said, no, I'm an industrial designer. And if you tell him like, oh, you're just a designer, you don't have to have an artist, I think he would have been like, oh, annoyed. So it's a very difficult position, like but yeah that's beautiful i mean since we started talking about the dune i'd love to introduce it to the audience especially since we're we're a part of the installation today how did the idea come about so the dune as the tapis siege or as the declive or as some other of the famous model we are now presenting for the first time were originally designed for a company, an American company called Herman Miller.

11:29Herman Miller used to have like, still have, I think, a project called Action Office. So Action Office is a modular program that you can adapt to any kind of spaces for offices. So my father, in the late 60s, was in discussion with Herman Miller and told him, like, I want to adapt this action of his program to the domestic market. So create a modular program that you can develop for any kind of environment and empty spaces. And it was also influenced by, you know, kings from the middle age, like you are deploying in a castle, you are putting all your furniture, then you are putting everything back in the rug and going to the next.

12:14So it has to be very easy to move, to transform and modular. So, yeah. So he developed this whole program between 1968 and 1970 and made the mock-up and presented to Herman Miller in 1972. And the project, because for many reasons, because it was a very expensive project to develop, because it was involving development of a lot of tools to produce the pieces and to make it at a price range that can fit the market. and also the oil crisis that was arriving in America and the world. And so the project had been rejected. And so it was the biggest disappointment in my father's career. So it stayed like mock-ups, drawings, plans, development, but no production.

13:07None of them were even prototyped. We're just like abandoned. And so... This was in the 70s? This was like in 72, yeah, finished. finish. And then this project went, the mock-up of this project went to the Centre Pompidou, the museum. And my father passed in 2009. None of this project, he constantly tried to present some of the model from this program to different industrial people. And they all rejected it because it was like utopia project. Like nobody wanted it. And so my father passed in 2009. and we, Paulin Paulin, started really in 2014 to start to develop the idea of producing some of those pieces.

13:54Originally, just to showcase it, like the intention was not a commercial intention. It was like really just to, I was excited to show those amazing designs my father developed and nobody ever saw or ever tried. And it became organically a business, a family business because people were interested. And Alice, my wife and I and my mother, we felt like, oh, there is like this good astral or universal alignment now. Maybe now it should exist. And it's always very exciting for me because a lot of people might think, oh, maybe Benjamin is the designer. And I'm always very happy with this. Not that I'm trying to pretend anything, but I like the fact that people think that it's now.

14:41It's a design from today. And it was like a design from 1968. And so it's a very intemporal and very fair design to give this impression to people. I would argue that the design doesn't even look like a design of today, but actually a design of tomorrow. Exactly. It looks so futuristic. And you know, it's funny. We made an exhibition recently in Seoul with, you know, Lee Jungje? Lee Jungje is this actor from... Squid Game. Oh, yes, of course. The main actor of Squid Game. He's a super funny guy, super nice guy. And I met the guy and we started to discuss the possibility of an exhibition because he was really into Poland, into design and everything.

15:26And so he proposed us like, oh, you should use my building, like make an exhibition. I have this building in Gangnam, like make an exhibition there. And so because it was him, we thought, oh, we should find a fair angle. Because we always, we could do many more exhibitions, but we're always trying to do something that looks to make sense. We don't need just to be there to be there like in a commercial way or something. It's not interesting for us. So we are always trying to find a good way to present the Poland legacy. and so with Jung Jae we started to discuss and then we thought oh we should exhibition focusing on the appearances of Poland furniture in the movies, series, in the pop culture and then we made a selection of it and we made like the exhibition we made it the main subject of the exhibition so it was like starring Pierre Poland with curated by, with Jung Jae and then Then we realized something that furniture of my father was used like in Star Trek or in James Bond or in all those series and movies from the 60s to represent the future.

16:41And today in new movies like such as, I don't know, Iron Man or many others, it's still used to represent the future. Which is crazy is that there is no new future. and future today is like can be like the chaos like the Mad Max kind of chaos or is like a minimalist version of the 70s future like it's like now it's all white used to be like very psychedelic now it's all white but it's the same thing there is no new future and it's a very interesting thing to realize It is.

17:53In terms of the simplicity in all these future assumptions, there's always this, it's incredibly useful, but it looks useless. And all these Star Trek type of things, you have these plain walls that turn into something. and the dune concept in this room is a bit of that where you walk in and it looks like it was designed to be one piece of dunes like in the desert but after your explanation i understood it's actually three modular pieces that you can move around like lego blocks yeah four actually different pieces that you can combine and create any time of any kind of sorry of landscapes interior landscapes or outdoor landscapes actually.

18:39What are the pieces? So you have like the seat, the back seat, just this one. This one? You have the angle where you're sitting. You have the peak like this one. And you have the flat one. Fine. So those four pieces can be combined and then you have the table that can be placed anywhere inside of the design. And now here we are playing with some podiums to create different levels. but this is just a and we also play with the tatamis that create a path in the room and we made like some tatamis also for the walls and the ceilings to create this all over impression. But what is very interesting with the dune but also with tapisierge like tapisierge is the four angles going up.

19:24It's another piece but it's part of the same. Yeah, we have it. It's part of the same program that was initially made for this American firm but that we now are calling the Pierre Paulin Programme, which was based on two metrics that we are following. And in a way, my father was thinking at this time that the future of furniture was disparation of the furniture. So you have to imagine the dunes or tapissage or the déclives as variation on how to articulate floors. So it's like there's no furniture. It's just articulated floors. So it's prototypes of articulation of the floors. I love that. For the audience who are not French speakers, tapis-siège means rug chair.

20:12Exactly. It's like a rug that becomes a chair. And downstairs you have one that you integrated music into. So this is an evolution of the initial idea. Tapis-siège was initially created for this program. we are talking about. And then in the early 80s, my father made a prototype of it. So I don't know, 10 years later, he made a prototype of it, but in a very rustic way because he didn't have the money to make it as it was initially taught about. And so he made this piece for our apartment in Paris. And I grew up on this piece that is now in a museum. and then in 85, 86, he was thinking to create an whole ensemble with an evolution of this concept of tapissage that he called the video barnum.

21:08And the video barnum was a large space like let's say 10 meter on 10 meter with like five tapissages like the one we have in the other room connected to each other, surrounded by sound systems and screens and that would be sort of an experiential room. So, as you understood, Polin, Polin, Polin is all about bringing the dream into the real life. And so we made also this project. We made it happen in a brain koozie workshop at Centre Pompidou during the Olympics. Thanks to Nike who helped us with this project. We made this installation integrating the sound. So the original idea of my father was the sound was surrounding the piece.

21:56And with Alice, when we developed this project, we realized that without alterating the design, without changing the design, we were able to integrate the sound. So then we thought, oh, this is an improvement to this concept, but it doesn't change the intention and the design. So we should try it. and so we did it and we're very happy with the result because it really changed the appreciation of the sound of the experience, it really changed everything so we are very happy with these first prototypes we are doing and this is a piece that we are now producing for a few clients that are interested in it but the way we are developing our piece we are not like we don't have any retailers or resellers We are just producing for people we know and that we know are interested in the pieces.

22:51So it's a very small market, but this is the way we are happy to do it. It's a real relation. All of our clients are somehow, it's more of a member club, I think, than a furniture brand. It is, absolutely. I've never experienced anything like the tapissage. The feeling of the music inside me is like, I feel like I'm hearing it through my body and not through my ears it's like a crazy feeling what I love was the piece that it's like listening to the music too loud without it being too loud so you can really be inside of the music it's a very cool experience and now we are thinking of many projects with this piece and hopefully we will succeed very soon to make some installation with this concept.

23:42I love that. In terms of the dunes on archiving in the 2010s, when you brought the design back to life and put it into the real world, it had an incredible significance in culture and got a lot of attention and desirability. And that's actually one of the first introductions I had to your father's work and also to your incredible works after your father's passing. And I've seen it in photos and works with people, including Frank Ocean, Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, all very big fans, Travis Scott. And I wonder about what is it about the design of the dune in particular that you think resonates so deeply with these people, but in particular resonates with these people today.

24:39well, this is my analyse, but I think somehow the youth of my father when he designed those pieces connected with the youth like a few generations after. And it was like, yeah, sort of an inevitable possibility. And I think people like Frank or they were very artistic persons, Like they are very, they have their own opinion. Like all those people that we are talking about, they have their own opinion. They are not like, oh, what should we buy to look cool? Like they see something and they have their own appreciation of it. So this is what happened with Frank. And it was, I think, very important in our connection with New Generation.

25:40To me, meeting Frank Ocean was an amazing, first of all, was an amazing meeting because we are really huge fans of everybody I'm in. But it was very influential on the New Generations. So it's really, it was more efficient that millions of books like to connect in a very deep way. And I think, you know, it's funny because like when, you know, I was doing music before and I mean, I quit school when I was like 15 years old to make rap music. So I was just doing rap for like almost 15 years. Wow. and my father was not a big fan of rap music but he was like very happy that I was doing something that was kind of successful I mean in France and that I was like not referring at all to him or his opinion or I was like totally into my world and not interested by his opinion and somehow this relation became something in the world.

26:58I think the universe twisted in a way that I like how rap music and design can be connected. And I don't feel like that I am the reason for that, but I feel very into this. To me, it's like you would tell this to the 17 years old me, I wouldn't believe it. Wow. Yeah. And when did your passion kick in? in the design and furniture world personally when when did i went into like so after after my father passed actually i was really deeply moved uh and so it was a i i never was interested by my father's work uh during his lifetime never talked about it never never because uh i was into music and i was not interested like i i was a bit autistic in my world i was not sharing like so but i grew up in his world so to me i was very sensitive to his universe to his aesthetic and to his vision but my father was a very nice person he was not the kind of creative people that are only talking about them so he was a very curious man he was talking about science about future about uh history of the people in the world i was very interested by many things it was not like focusing on him.

28:20It was never talking about him, actually. So this was very helpful also to develop as a kid, I think. And somehow, a few years after he passed, I went to an exhibition with Alice, and I felt in front of a prototype I grew up on called La Déclive, a piece you have in the entrance, like the big red piece in the entrance, the modular piece with like two vertebra. And so, and I was really moved to see this piece because like I could smell, I could remember the smell, remember the touch, remember spending like all weekends with the cats playing on it. And now it was a museum piece, so you cannot touch it.

29:06You cannot, you can just look at it. And somehow I was very proud because it was in a museum, So it was celebrated as a art. But somehow I was also a bit sad because now as it's a museum piece, it's a unique piece. So nobody will sit on it anymore. And it's it lost the function. And so contrary to art, like the function is also important in design. So if you cannot sit in it, like it's kind of you miss something. so the same day I was invited to dinner at Azedin Alaya Azedin Alaya was a dear friend of my father and mother and he was like a fashion designer and unfortunately passed a few years ago and so I was next to Azedin and at the time I told you I was still a rapper like officially so I was not a very it was complicated for me to talk with him because I didn't have the subject of conversation or anything.

30:12I was a bit like this kind of guy, you know, and, and, and so I felt I should told him about this feeling I had in this, in the museum. And I told him, and he was, and he told me, you know what, tell me how much money you want and you will produce one piece for me so there so there will be one out of the museum so people will be able to experience it okay so would you do it and and i say yeah i'll do it and it just opened a door in my mind and and and with alice with my mother we discussed it and we said we should do it we should do it and and so that was the so far the vertebrae so yeah exactly so we made the first prototype of it uh based on the prototype from 1967, 66.

31:03And, and, and so we made it for him. And then he is, it's still in, in the house in Paris. And, and so it was like the first piece we produced. And did you use your father's supply chain or did you have to start from scratch? So yeah, we had to start from scratch because we had, of course we have the plan, we have the prototype, we have, and I was glad that I found back like the guy called Michel was like the collaborator of the assistant of my father, the technical assistant of my father, that is still very in good shape. And he helped us a lot on this. And then he helped us on everything else to start this project.

31:38And so we really went into the archives. We really went into the intentions and everything. And so it really started like that. So Azedin was sort of the first step. And then we made this piece for him. And I think thanks to his influence, we also been able to collaborate with the first show of Nicolas Ghesquière in Monaco. It was the 2014 cruise fashion show in Monaco. So we made all the sofas for the setup of the show. It was actually the old setup of the show. And then we met Michael Burke, who was the CEO of Vuitton at the time. and uh and uh and we told to michael burke like uh because at the time michael burke like louis vritton they made this house the perion house that was from the drawings also it was the first time it was produced and so and so we were we told michael like oh you know we also have this project that was never produced at the time and he said oh uh okay but we have to be ready in six months and it was like really challenging but uh with the help of louis vuitton we made like the first prototypes and everything.

32:54And so, but it was just an exhibition. So they were the mesen for an exhibition. And so we made this first exhibition in Miami and everybody wanted to buy everything. So it has been like sort of a signal that, oh, this is crazy what's happening. Like those designs that were nobody wanted, that nobody was interested in, like suddenly is becoming something, an interest. And so then we met Emmanuel Perrotin at the dinner of the show of Vuitton in Miami. And I was next to Emmanuel and told him, like, oh, I want to make this show in Paris. And with Alice, we are thinking, like, we should do this. And he said, oh, it's a great idea to make a show in Paris, but you should do differently.

33:40So he explained us a lot of things. He was also very kind to us. And he opened his gallery for us. the first show we made like in the gallery show was Emmanuel Perrotin really opened this gallery for us. It was amazing. In Paris. And it was very nice and all the relations have been like really bienveillante. It was very cool. And so then we made a show in New York also with him and it really started like that, you know, kind of accidentally. Like it was very organic, like for real. It was nothing was planned. It really just happened like an avalanche. And, you know, uh it was a great feeling and and and it only be natural relation natural connections natural it never been like nothing was forced nothing was like difficult like we it was just a good timing yeah my father designer had to wait like uh 50 years but it was like finally the good timing in those exhibitions were most of the designs designs that your father brought into reality that you reintroduced or were they works that never left the drawings that you brought to life mainly never left the drawings all the modular program like the like the dunes never left the drawings and some of them were prototyped or even more were produced for french palaces in the 60s, 70s or 80s.

35:07But they've never been like editions. So except in very rare occasion, you cannot find a vintage. There is no vintage. Sometimes it's amusing because, you know, unfortunately it's part of it. Like you have copies. Everybody's doing copies of everything now. You have fake pieces. And sometimes when I catch up a fake one, I send a message to the guy and say, like, this is fake. Like, you shouldn't have this piece. And sometimes they are replying. I see so many fakes. Oh, yeah. We are fighting, but it's a complex fight because, you know, the laws are not the same in every country. So you have to fight in every country with different.

35:52So we are doing it, but it's complicated. I think it's part of the success, if I can say. Yes. and uh and uh so sometimes i call i text the guys and dm them and and they are telling me oh it's a vintage one like no there's no vintage like you didn't buy it in the vintage store like there is no vintage basically the first one was produced in 2014 so you're just lying and uh and uh but you know as i said like i don't want to be too uh sometimes i'm very pissed like and i started to trash everybody on Instagram, but I need to stop that. I don't want to become Kanye West. Like, you know, we know how it ends.