DESIGNER

Janine Abraham & Dirk Jan Rol

Rare couple of designers at that time, Janine Abraham and Dirk Jan Rol worked in symbiosis all their life and Janine can be considered as one of the first women designer in France. She is trained in one of the best French schools, Camondo by some great masters like Maxime Old or René-Jean Caillette and integrates very quickly the study office of Jacques Dumont.

ABRAHAM & ROL
Janine Abraham 1929-2005
Dirk Jan Rol 1929

Dirk Jan Rol, he began with a cabinetmaker training in Holland, his home country but quickly joined the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris whose artistic influence seduced him. He attended classes by Louis Sognot and Paul Dupré Lafon before joining Jacques Dumont’s studio. Both trained in the rigor, inventiveness, modernity and great tradition of the French decorative arts, their aesthetic connivance quickly turns into an idyll and they get married in 1955, open their own agency and participate in many exhibitions. They are noticed by the creation of some models like a fireside chair in folded metal wire and aluminum, today in the collections of the Georges Pompidou center or the revolutionary rattan armchairs. Their very modern productions are always very remarkable, inspired as much by the traditional Japanese house as by the contemporary American architecture. This art of sophisticated staging and a taste for graphic arts and architecture allow them to design chains like Yves Rocher or Huchers Minvielle. Their talent for using all kinds of materials (aluminum, rattan, metal, plywood, tempered glass, plexiglass) allows them to create some iconic furniture of the 20th century like the sun chair or convertible AR bench. They also become architects and build beautiful villas open to nature because Rol has always dreamed of being a landscaper. They have designed little lighting and none has been published because probably too expensive at the time. Nevertheless, one finds there the love of the wood of Rol, the sense of the treated materials and a search of intimacy very typical of their architecture by the enhancement of the luminous atmosphere.