In the late 1960s, the French sculptor Odile Mir was hired as a freelance designer at the Delmas lighting factory, in Montauban, in the southern French region of Occitanie—an hour’s drive from Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe, the village where she lived with her husband and teenage daughter. She was the only female designer working in the factory, conceiving and producing lighting prototypes to be sold to major department stores all over France. (She had already learned welding from the blacksmith in her town.) At night, she stayed back after everyone had gone home and focused on her “real work” as an established artist, which saw her creating imposing bronze and steel sculptural forms and figures that towered above her 5-foot-3-inch frame.
In her artistic practice, Mir was accustomed to using whatever materials were lying around, and one day, she welded together steel chrome tubes to create an armchair, with a sheath of leather as the seat. “It was all on hand, so I could do everything in the one place,” Mir says of the access she had to both materials and machinery. This moment of spontaneity led her to launch a fruitful career in furniture design.
That same chair was casually plonked down in the foyer of the lighting factory, where it caught the eye of a buyer from Prisunic, the then-popular French department store that was later absorbed into the still-popular Monoprix chain. “They asked if we had started making furniture,” recounts Mir, “and my boss replied that ‘It’s just the modéliste [model maker] having a little fun.’ ” Despite the boss’s dismissive tone, the armchair was added to Prisunic’s sought-after, affordable design offerings and became part of a larger collection of furniture Mir designed, titled Filo. It kicked off an 11-year collaboration with the store, placing Mir alongside some of the biggest design names of that time, such as Terence Conran, Marc Held, Claude Courtecuisse, Gae Aulenti and Danielle Quarante. (Mir also created about 30 or so designs that were produced and sold by Delmas.)
It was not until relatively recently that Mir’s granddaughter, interior designer Léonie Alma Mason, of Paris-based LA.M Studio, became fully aware of this chapter of her grandmother’s life. At the sprightly age of 90, Mir had been trying to get one of her armchairs reproduced with local artisans in Toulouse and approached Mason for her help. “I am not a businesswoman,” Mir, now 94, says with a shrug. This project led to an excavation of Mir’s atelier, at her home in Toulouse, where she and Mason unearthed many more sketches and photos. “I knew about this first lounge chair, but I had no idea she had created around 40 pieces,” says Mason, 34.
The fruits of this discovery have led to a new family collaboration called LOMM Editions, soft launching this May with the re-edition of Mir’s Duo lamp for Prisunic. Three more of Mir’s Prisunic designs—the chair, ottoman and magazine rack from her Filo line—will debut later this year. Prices will range from around $900 to $2,800. The furniture, which is being produced in France and elsewhere in Europe, has the sleek industrial style of the ’70s—the steel tubing finished in a gleaming chrome that is tempered by the vegetal leather seating—and the elegant, clean lines remain in step with the minimalist modes of today.
Prisunic’s raison d’être was to create affordable designer objects, furniture, art and fashion. It had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s when furniture design was influenced by the “beautiful days of plastic,” says French curator Marianne Brabant. In that respect, Mir’s furniture was distinct as it featured industrial finishes, like chrome, and was sculptural in form. “Mir is more artistic in her design than the others. She designed with her own hands. You can feel it in her furniture—it is not an industrial way of making things,” says Brabant, who is curating an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on the affordable design legacy of Prisunic and Monoprix, opening this December.The show reflects a renewed interest in this period—enhanced, no doubt, by the fact that so few pieces remain out there today. Mir’s Prisunic creations are harder to find than, say, those of Held, who was better known. One of her styles, the David lounge chair, which has a hammock-like cowskin seat suspended from a steel structure, sold at Prisunic for 350 francs, or roughly $70, in the 1970s. These days, the asking price can reach upward of $10,000.
Mir still works on her sculpture every day, alongside her work for LOMM. She and Mason plan to release a new collection each year, imagined as styles that work together or stand confidently on their own. “Léonie knows how to do everything I don’t,” Mir says happily of their working dynamic. “And she also knows how to do the things I do know how to do.”