Louis Vuitton has opened the doors of a private mansion on rue de Martignac in Paris for Design Week, and the centrepiece is impossible to miss. The Kubic Armchair, the latest addition to the House's Pierre Legrain Homage Collection, sits within a grand 7th arrondissement hotel particulier where nearly 500 participants have descended for the city's annual celebration of creativity. From 10 to 13 September, the exhibition is free to visit by reservation, a rare invitation into the world of Louis Vuitton's expanding design universe.
A Chair With a Century of History
The Kubic Armchair is not simply a new design. It is a direct conversation with a piece created over a hundred years ago. Pierre Legrain, the French decorator, illustrator, bookbinder and cabinetmaker, first conceived the original for the collector and couturier Jacques Doucet in 1923. That same decade, Legrain collaborated with Louis Vuitton and produced the House's very first piece of furniture, the Louis Vuitton Dressing Table. His work connected the brand with the decorative arts at a moment when Gaston-Louis Vuitton was pushing the company beyond trunks and travel.
The contemporary Kubic retains the original's sharply geometric construction: a trapezoidal backrest, faceted armrests and notched rosewood legs that sit at the crossroads of Art Deco and Cubism. The difference is in the materials. Nomade leather, a signature of Louis Vuitton's leather goods, covers the main surfaces, while rosewood side legs introduce a warm, material contrast. It reads not as a reproduction but as a translation, one that takes Legrain's architectural language and gives it to the House's master leatherworkers and cabinetmakers.
Objets Nomades and Beyond
The Kubic Armchair joins a broader presentation that includes pieces drawn from the archives of Charlotte Perriand and Fortunato Depero alongside new work from Estudio Campana, Raw Edges and Franck Genser. Together, they form the latest chapter of Objets Nomades, the limited-edition design programme Louis Vuitton launched in 2012 as a platform for collaborations between contemporary designers and the House's artisans. What began as a collection of foldable furniture inspired by travel has grown into a full design ecosystem.
In 2025, Louis Vuitton introduced its Home Collections, expanding into furniture, lighting, decorative objects, textiles, tableware and games. The Martignac exhibition places the Kubic within that wider context, showing how the House is moving from a single design object to a complete interior language. The setting reinforces the point: gilded mouldings, herringbone floors and tall windows frame pieces that could only exist within the tension between heritage architecture and forward-looking design.
The Art Deco Centenary
The Pierre Legrain Homage Collection has particular weight this year. It was developed in connection with the centenary of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the event that gave Art Deco its name and established it as an international movement. Louis Vuitton participated in that original exhibition, and the current collection uses Legrain's geometric vocabulary as a starting point rather than a literal template.
Rather than reproducing archive pieces, the House treats them as blueprints for contemporary interpretation. The Kubic Armchair exemplifies this approach. Its cubic lines and angular geometry echo Legrain's 1923 original, yet the materials speak to now: the buttery Nomade leather that LV uses across its leather goods, the warmth of rosewood, the precision of modern cabinetmaking. The effect is a chair that could sit in a Doucet apartment or a contemporary Parisian flat with equal conviction. It is design that looks backwards and forwards at the same time, and that duality is what makes the collection resonant.
From Milan to Paris
The Paris presentation follows an earlier showing at Palazzo Serbelloni during Milan Design Week earlier this year. Each venue shifts the context. Where Milan offered Renaissance grandeur, the Martignac mansion brings a distinctly Parisian intimacy, a hotel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain where domestic proportions meet decorative ambition. The Kubic Armchair, the flower-shaped chair by Estudio Campana and the full range of Objets Nomades are arranged not as a showroom but as rooms one might live in, each object given space to breathe within the architecture.
Last year, Louis Vuitton previewed its design direction at LV Dream during Design Miami, where Objets Nomades, the Campana pieces and the Appartement Louis Vuitton created a full-scale domestic backdrop. The Martignac exhibition continues that trajectory, pushing further into the territory where fashion, furniture and decorative arts converge. More than a century after Legrain designed the original for Doucet, his geometry has found a new home.
Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades is on view at Hotel Particulier Louis Vuitton, 18 rue de Martignac, 75007 Paris, until 13 September 2026. Free entry by reservation.