Franck Genser exemplifies how a French engineer turned designer blends Art Nouveau, craftsmanship, and technology to redefine furniture as living sculpture.
The engineer Franck Genser was brought up in northeast France. Although he has been an entrepreneur for over 30 years, creating and developing companies in different sectors and countries around the world, he never stopped nurturing his passion for decorative arts and 19th-century Art Nouveau, which he discovered as a child in antique auctions.
Eventually, this intimate relationship with furniture (as well as not being able to find in the market the types of products he wanted) led him to create his brand, Franck Genser, in 2016.
Creating a Style by Reinventing French Elegance
Both timeless and contemporary, the style Franck Genser has developed for his brand reinvents a distinctly French elegance by bearing witness to our times and bringing craftsmanship to life in heritage and sensual creations.
“French elegance is a way of thinking. In French elegance, things are not merely just useful. We attach importance to the way we cross our lives and people. Elegance is not just to do it—it is about what you feel when you do it,” he told ArchiExpo e-Magazine.
The designs from Art Nouveau times—Franck’s main influence and the force that got him into this universe—are punctuated by fluid lines, symbolic shapes, and faunal motifs. All these elements are today part of Franck’s most iconic creations. Take, for example, the Piscine collection, which consists of five different models of tables (I, II, III, IV, and V) with a symbolic swimming pool shape that invites calm and relaxation.
While their ladder-shaped bases are made of waxed brass, the hot bronze patina (which took months of experimentation to reach the right color and texture) on the tops captures the depth and movement of water, adding a unique blue color to the piece. Almost suspended, the tables rest on four rounded golden ladders.
The Giraffe table, on the other hand, a console table made of stained ash marquetry, is a perfect example of a faunal motif—or animality, as Franck puts it. The fluidity of lines can be observed in Franck’s seating range, especially in the curved Salamandre chair, whose design and comfort embody elegance and savoir vivre. The Scarf collection is the brand’s most recent launch when it comes to seating, and it also presents fluid, enveloping silhouettes that combine comfort with purity of form. It has one armchair (Scarf Fauteuil) and three sofas (Scarf 240, Scarf 340, and Scarf Méridienne).
Creating Furniture that Bonds People to Their Environment
Franck Genser items are, above all, works of art, sculptures that capture light and attention, combining the excellence of artistic craftsmanship, the quality of materials used, and technological achievement. Although he meticulously crafts each item with the goal of striking a balance between visual appeal and functionality, Franck believes that the aesthetics of a piece of furniture and the effect it causes on us should be its primary function.
“Furniture doesn’t always have to be useful. If it makes you feel good, then it already serves a purpose,” he believes.
Franck also maintains that designers should focus more on conceiving a piece with its aesthetics in mind, rather than prioritizing its more obvious functions. “When I create a product, I first create a piece of art. Then I go to function and try to keep the rest of the initial idea,” he says.
Fascinated by the “soul of objects and all dimensions of their influence on the individual,” Franck is deeply attached to the relationships between human beings and their environment.
“Our furniture becomes familiar; we live with it daily; it becomes ‘companion furniture,'” in his words.
He applies this vision of design not just to his production, which aims to enhance the overall living experience of its customers, but also to the architecture of interiors. After all, a room, its layout, and the light it offers preexist and condition the experience people have inside that ambiance. And that is another reason Franck boldly believes that the aesthetics of a room or furniture item are the first of all its functions.
Bringing Different Skills and Technology to the Production
All of Franck Genser’s furniture items are fully produced at its Parisian workshop at Boulevard Masséna, where a dozen designers, engineers, and artisans develop unique pieces or small series. The team brings together all the skills necessary to create a piece of furniture, ranging from the most innovative techniques, such as robotics and virtual reality for project visualization, to traditional methods like cabinetmaking, upholstery, gilding, art foundry work, alabaster crafting, and vegetable lacquer in its finest variations.
When asked about technological novelties, Franck is particularly enthusiastic about 3D printing.
“We can prototype very fast and very cheaply at a reasonable cost. It’s a miracle of our time. We are able to test solutions very easily,” he says.
By the way, the ecology of materials is at the heart of each Franck Genser project: noble materials, solid wood, parchment, vegetable lacquer, and so on. The firm preserves the natural features of the materials it works with, and the approach is essentially that of custom-made—with each piece perfectly integrating into the place that will welcome it and embodying the identity of its owner.
A Bold Dream for the Future
When asked about possible future projects, Franck says he would like to find a client willing to embark on what he calls “a total creation,” just like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, a villa and gate lodge located in Poissy, on the outskirts of Paris, France, which form a modernist manifesto. “A total freedom—no deadlines and no budget. The quality of the production is directly linked to the quality of the client,” he says.
