Showroom

Liaigre

Over 400 pieces in various finishes, made by French artisans. Generous proportions and rich materials.

Liaigre is a French house that does interior architecture and makes the furniture that goes into it, and the New York showroom is at 102 Madison Avenue. Christian Liaigre founded it and the work still carries his discipline: dark timbers, restrained profiles, and upholstery cut close rather than soft.

What the showroom carries is the furniture and lighting collection, sofas including the Arpège, along with seating, cabinets, desks, tables, bedroom pieces and decorative objects. The house also takes on private and public interiors and has a long record in yacht interiors, which is where the tight dimensioning comes from and which shows in the furniture.

The reason to see it rather than specify it from imagery is scale and edge. Liaigre pieces photograph as simple volumes and read differently in a room, where the thickness of an arm and the height of a seat back are doing the work. A sofa that looks generous in a catalogue image can sit lower and shallower than a client is expecting, and that is a decision about how a room will actually be used rather than a preference.

Because the house does interiors as well as furniture, the showroom conversation can go further than a piece. A designer working a whole room can get the finishes and the upholstery specified as a set rather than assembled item by item.

The showroom is open to the public on weekdays from 10 to 6 and takes no appointment.

Sit in it and measure it before it goes on a plan. Seat height and depth are where this furniture differs most from what it resembles, and a client who wanted comfortable and received exacting will say so once the room is finished rather than while it is being drawn.