While it’s technically a sofa, the Dune by the late French designer Pierre Paulin is, like its name suggests, more of a landscape. First off, it’s enormous. Composed of modular sections, it’s often configured in an ensemble that’s over 10 feet wide and deep but can theoretically become infinitely larger, with backrests that give it a topographic feeling and tables that nestle inside like small oases. Paulin’s design comes from a place of generosity, as he conceived of the Dune as something that could be adapted to an array of lifestyles.
The Dune is part of a series of modular home furniture that included seating, bookshelves, and tables that Paulin designed between 1968 and 1972 with the hope that Herman Miller would manufacture them. The project was never put into production. For decades the only people who were able to experience the experimental way of living that Paulin imagined was his family; the designer furnished his weekend home with the prototypes, which are, in a rare occurrence, on view to the public in Pierre Paulin: Action House, an exhibition at the Judd Foundation through February 15.
Since Paulin died in 2009, his avant garde seating landscapes have steadily gained the recognition that they didn’t receive when he made them, becoming cult favorites in the music industry after Paulin’s family decided to pick up where he left off and start making the designs. Since then, the Dune has become the furniture world’s equivalent of a Birkin bag, a coveted status symbol that not just anyone can buy. To wit: The Dune is sometimes referred to as “Frank Ocean’s couch” after the musician posted a photograph of himself napping in one back in 2019. Among the artists who own or have been photographed on Action House sofas? Larry June, Peggy Gou, Flea, and Travis Scott.
The story of how an obscure, and some might say failed, project has ascended into pop culture royalty is a design industry lesson in how Paulin’s family has thoughtfully, and carefully, managed an archive, emphasizing personal connections with the designs over a mass commercialization strategy. After all, that the Dune sofa is in anyone’s home at all is deeply personal. “It was just me being sad about my father’s passing,” says Benjamin Paulin, Pierre’s son. “Suddenly I was obsessed with his archives and his work because to me it was sort of a way to connect to him through a new discussion. My father was very devoted to his work, but he was not the type of creative person who constantly talked about himself.”
A ‘Utopian’ Design That Was Hard to Mass Produce
Paulin, who trained as a sculptor, designed furniture that was meant to be viewed in 360 degrees. In a December panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition, Benjamin explained that Paulin was “obsessed with finding a way to avoid any default in a chair so that you can look at the piece from any angle without seeing technical details or little ugly things.” His innovation was to view the structure of a chair or sofa as a skeleton, which he then padded in molded foam that was used in the automotive industry and wrapped in stretchy swimsuit material to achieve contoured forms. Because of the technical experimentation, Paulin often had a hard time finding manufacturers to produce his designs.
The collection in the Action House exhibition—which was simply named “the Program” in Paulin’s records—involved more technical and conceptual experimentation. Paulin was exploring how a residential space would read more like a total environment. To that end, the seating was “an articulation of the floor,” Benjamin explains.
In the early 1970s, Paulin brought a maquette of his concept to Herman Miller’s Michigan headquarters, hoping that they might produce the project. There isn’t much in the Herman Miller archives about the project. So far, Amy Auscherman, the head of archives and brand heritage at MillerKnoll, Herman Miller’s parent company, has only found one brief mention of the project in a partial photocopy of a May 1973 design and development document. It includes the “Paulin System” alongside the Co/Struc system, an adaptation of the Action Office for health care; the Poul Kjaerholm collection, which the company briefly distributed in the 1970s; and the Chadwick modular seating project. (There might be more about the Paulin system in other papers that have yet to be discovered or processed.)
Auscherman’s theory is that Herman Miller was interested in raising its profile in Europe and potentially developing more residential products and so engaged with Paulin. It’s not clear why the project didn’t progress. Paulin himself thought the project was “too utopian.” But there were likely business reasons. “An interesting part of the history of the design is really how so many of these things do or do not enter the world because of a business decision,” Auscherman says. “Like, the economy was bad that year, so Herman Miller just didn’t pursue a residential system.”
Family Matters
While Paulin’s concept wasn’t picked up when he was alive, he and his family were at least able to enjoy the prototypes he commissioned. The Déclive, a U-shaped legless design, was Benjamin’s favorite. “I grew up on it, playing with the cat, reading books,” he says.
The Centre Pompidou acquired some of the prototypes as well as the maquettes. After Paulin’s passing, there was a revival of interest in his experimental work and galleries and museums began to include his designs in exhibitions. Benjamin had forgotten about the Déclive until seeing it in the exhibition. It was a bittersweet encounter. “I was really moved because I can still feel and smell the textile and sense the impression of comfort, but I was not able to touch it because now it was a museum piece,” he says. “I felt like, wow, if I have a kid one day, they won’t be able to experience what I used to experience.”
That same evening, Benjamin attended a dinner at the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa’s home and the museum experience came up in conversation. “I was a bit intimidated at the time and didn’t know what to tell him, so I told him this story about the Déclive that I saw this same day,” Benjamin recalls. “Then he told me, ‘Tell me how much money you want and then produce one for me so at least there will be one outside of the museum.’” Without knowing how he was going to do it, Benjamin said yes.
The Dune Revival and a New Collector’s Market
After delivering the sofa to Alaïa, word got around in the French design scene that Benjamin was reviving some of his father’s experimental pieces under the label Paulin Paulin Paulin, which he and his family launched in 2013. (Companies like Artifort and Ligne Roset have made, and continue to make some of Paulin’s easier-to-manufacture designs.)
“It started avalanche style,” Paulin says. Nicolas Ghesquière, a Paulin collector, commissioned 30 long, slender Osaka sofas (which Paulin designed in 1967 and weren’t part of the Action House project) for a Louis Vuitton fashion show in 2014. Through this, Benjamin then met Michael Burke, the CEO of LVMH, and successfully proposed an exhibition on the Action House collection as a follow-up to the brand’s Design Miami realization of a never-built Charlotte Perriand house. Then at the opening dinner for the 2014 show, Benjamin met the art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, who eventually commissioned limited editions of the pieces for a 2016 solo show on Paulin. That same year, the Centre Pompidou staged a retrospective on the designer, which brought his work to a wider audience.
“We just do what we feel is amazing to do,” Benjamin says of the projects Paulin Paulin Paulin takes on. “And then if people are interested in buying the pieces, then the commercial part is done, but we don’t want to make it the first priority.”
After the Design Miami exhibition, musicians, who were just entering the design gallery world, began to take note of Paulin’s designs. Benjamin, who was signed to Universal Music Group before going into the furniture business, was eager to share the history. Benjamin received inquiries from Kanye West, who furnished his Paris showroom with Paulin sofas, and then Ocean.
Benjamin suspects that his respect for and knowledge about the music industry has helped bridge Paulin’s work to recording artists. “When I met Kanye, I really wanted him to connect with me because I was fascinated by him as a musician and I wanted him to be fascinated by my father’s work,” Benjamin says.
Feelings of mutual respect between industries weren’t the norm then. “At the same time, people from the music industry were going to design galleries and maybe were not receiving the same kind of interest because people didn’t know them,” Benjamin says. “A very famous gallery in Paris told me that one day a guy came to their Design Miami booth to ask him about the price of the table and he was thinking it was a security guy. And it was Puff Daddy.” (The design industry’s casual racism has long been a problem.)
Auscherman notes that the rise of Pierre Paulin in celebrity circles is an example of a new market of design collectors. “Design is more mainstream than ever,” Auscherman says. “And so a Dune sofa is achieving the aura of a Bentley or a Rolex. I don’t want to say it’s a trophy, but because it’s usable, it’s almost even better. You get to live with it.”
Paulin Paulin Paulin’s Instagram is a little like Page Six, with photos of the brand’s famous fans. Benjamin notes that the company doesn’t commission paid endorsements or influencers. “I never post images of celebrities with our furniture when they don’t post it first,” he says.
As more people learn about Paulin’s furniture and what it symbolizes, the demand for installations rises. For the Paris Olympics last year, Paulin Paulin Paulin collaborated with Nike on a listening room composed of half a dozen Tapis-Siège sofas (translated to “carpet seat,” these designs lay flat and have corners that can be propped up to make seat backs). The installation traveled to Design Miami, as part of a collaboration with the athlete and designer Stefon Diggs, and then to Las Vegas.
Still, production remains small. The brand makes the Dune sofas to order in France and last year less than 20 were sold. The exhibition at the Judd Foundation is one of the few places to experience the genuine articles in person. (Like all status sofas, there’s an unfortunate knockoff economy for the designs.) After Flavin Judd, the Foundation’s artistic director and Donald Judd’s son, saw the prototypes and photographs of the maquettes in Benjamin’s home and learned about the similarities between how Paulin and Judd approached furniture, he wanted to exhibit the pieces in New York.
“There’s something similar synergistic between the way Judd and Paulin furniture functions in a space,” commented Alexanda Cunningham-Cameron, a curator at the Cooper Hewitt, in a December panel discussion about the exhibition. “It holds the space in a particular way, which is the furniture becoming the architecture and diffusing the boundary between the space and the environment and the objects.”
Benjamin welcomes more interest in his father’s designs and wants to bring them to more museums and galleries. He’s also continuing to deepen his relationship with the music industry. To wit: he’s turning his home into a recording studio and inviting people to create what he calls “the sound of Paulin.”
“I’m dreaming of [Paulin Paulin Paulin] more as a members club than as a brand,” Benjamin says. “I don’t want to be a brand. I like the idea of a community where I feel connected to all the people who own our pieces because they are all very interesting and from a lot of different worlds. I am glad that we can be the common point between so many amazing people.”
