Francois Thevenin

François Thévenin is an architect, sculptor and furniture designer.

Born in 1931, this Beaux-Arts student in Paris returned to his native Côte d'Azur in the mid-1960s, when the architect Jacques Couëlle started the construction of Castellaras, a vast colony of billionaires located between Mougins and Mouans- Sartoux.

Together, they invented the "landscape house", an ecological design before its time, where the habitat fits in perfectly with its natural environment. For this project, François Thévenin dresses the homes with chairs, coffee tables, lights and stair railings; as many pieces in metal, brass, forged by hand, even in wood.

His work is characterized by the intensive use of the hammer, which he particularly likes, some parts requiring up to 300 hours of manual labor. For him, the metal thus worked evokes the purity of the elements and the harshness of the sun which strikes in the heart of summer.

Thévenin worked for a long time with his wife Sido, sometimes working with her and with four hands on a single piece of metal.

LECLAIREUR offers the Crypto Séries (1985), four original works, in organic forms, representative of his work and made in bronze and metal.