Essential Forms
Pastis by Julien Renault for Hay (image: Fabian Frinzel).
There are several proposed derivations for the word “pastis”, but all swim in similar waters. The French aperitif, an anise liquor typically served diluted, may take its name from the French “pastiche”, the Occitan “pastís”, or the Provençal “pastisson”, all of which refer to ideas of mixture and combination.
It is, as such, an unusual name for Julien Renault’s new collection of wooden chairs and bistro tables for Danish furniture brand Hay: as picture perfect a representation of brasserie dining as you are likely to find. “It’s very classic,” acknowledges Renault, who says that his design practice is driven by an appreciation of essentialism and a preference for careful detailing as a mode of “beautifying the ordinary”. “I like to have something that is enough to tell everything,” Renault explains. “I need a click – a detail that, when I have it, I have the whole design and can build around that.”
In the case of Pastis, this click is a subtly curving wooden profile that serves as an armrest in the chair and a leg in the table. It is a beautiful, characterful element, but not one that distracts from the seeming purity of the collection; were you to ask someone to sketch an archetypal wooden chair, there is a good chance the outcome would resemble Pastis. “Hay said it’s the most mature chair they’ve ever done,” Renault notes, “maybe even timeless in a way. But I had a particular atmosphere in mind that I wanted to create when designing this.” Rather than revelling in mixture and combination to create a brasserie atmosphere, however, Pastis’s visual simplicity could suggest an exercise in reduction and purification. It is a particularly chair-like chair; a tablelike table. Undiluted, if you will.
Yet there is no such thing as a Platonic chair – the archetypal forms we inherit and rework are culturally determined, having been shaped by contingent historical factors such as material availability, production capabilities, cost, and aesthetic taste. One chair is no more essentially chair-like than any other – the designs we deem timeless are, in fact, mongrel mixtures of elements that might easily have been otherwise. Take Pastis’s curved profile, for instance. “That’s from After Life,” explains Renault phlegmatically. “The Netflix soap.” While watching the programme during lockdown, Renault noticed a side table set in the background of a scene filmed in an English tearoom. “I just saw the shape of the armrests I wanted in its legs,” he says. “So I sketched it and sent it to Hay.”
It is a novel mixture: a classic form that has found renewal through happenstance and Netflix streaming. Seeming purity, as ever, owes a debt to serendipity. “I just thought it was a nice shape to translate into a chair and table,” summarises Renault. “I found that curve and, suddenly, the atmosphere I had wanted was there.”
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.