
06.22.20
Excerpt: Exhibition
At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate
This month — after a long, COVID-induced delay — the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen finally begin their four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they’ve designed specifically in response to the installation site. Muller Van Severen is an almost scarily perfect match for the Villa Cavrois: The rectilinearity of the estate’s yellow brick shell is reflected in the rational lines of their wire s# series, while the green marble of Cavrois’s dining room recalls their frequent use of mixed marble and the high-gloss hue of their aluminum chairs. Even the checkerboard tile pattern in the kitchen of Cavrois recalls Muller Van Severen’s own home in Ghent. “Time becomes irrelevant in this project, as we want to create the poetic feeling that our objects could originate from the same time as the building, in the same way that the building itself feels very contemporary,” explain the duo. On view until October 31.