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Christian Liaigre, Minimalist Interior Designer, Dies at 77

Known for his muscular and clean-lined furniture, Mr. Liaigre designed the influential Mercer hotel in SoHo, as well as the homes of Rupert Murdoch and others.

The designer Christian Liaigre in an undated photo. His sparse interiors and elegant if unadorned furniture exemplified 1990s minimalism.Credit...via Liaigre

Christian Liaigre, a French interior and furniture designer whose muscular and elegant objects in wood, bronze and leather were emblematic of 1990s minimalism, and whose clients included Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, Rupert Murdoch and the Mercer hotel in SoHo, died on Sept. 2 in Paris. He was 77.

His design firm, Liaigre, announced his death on Instagram without specifying the cause.

Mr. Liaigre (pronounced lee-AY-gruh) had been an art student and a drawing teacher and had worked with show horses before he began making furniture in the early 1980s. By the turn of the next decade, a chunky, cracked wooden stool inspired by Brancusi’s sculpture “Endless Column” had become his calling card, its gutsy and elemental shape a corrective to the fussy opulence — the swags of chintz and Louis chairs — that had defined the excesses of the ’80s.

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This chunky, cracked wooden stool became Mr. Liaigre’s calling card, its elemental shape a corrective to the fussy opulence of the 1980s.Credit...via Liaigre

The Mercer, which André Balazs opened in 1997, introduced Mr. Liaigre to the United States. The hotel’s new-old Modernism and loftlike rooms attracted movie stars (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, who felt so at home there that he once hurled a phone at a desk clerk) and designers like Mr. Klein, who lived there before its official opening and liked his rooms so much that he hired Mr. Liaigre to design his own apartment at the Police Building, a few blocks south.

“It was a complete aesthetic, and I don’t think anyone did it better,” Mr. Klein said in a phone interview.

Other high-profile clients followed, including Mr. Murdoch and his wife at the time, Wendi Murdoch, for whom Mr. Liagre designed a triplex in SoHo and a 184-foot sailing yacht named Rosehearty.

His dark, low-slung wenge-wood furniture, and his clean-lined linen sofas in white and pale lavender, were soon copied ad infinitum; for decades they would influence trendy hotel interiors, pricey condo developments and furniture emporiums like West Elm and Restoration Hardware. (By the late 1990s, wenge wood, his signature material, had been knocked off so often that it became a design-world punch line.)

Along with the austere architecture of John Pawson and the unadorned clothing of Mr. Klein and Helmut Lang, Mr. Liaigre’s works — sculptural tables, seats and lamps constructed of bronze, stone and ebonized woods — were touchstones for a generation that expressed its wealth in earth tones and a monkish lack of ornament.

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Wendi and Rupert Murdoch commissioned Mr. Liaigre to design their triplex in SoHo after seeing his rooms at the Mercer hotel.Credit...Fred Conrad/The New York Times

His work resonated with craftsmen and architects, too, because the joinery was often the ornament. Ian Schrager, the hotelier and developer, hired both Mr. Pawson and Mr. Liaigre to design his penthouse at 40 Bond Street in the NoHo section of Manhattan, a Herzog & de Meuron showplace, as well as his house in Southampton, N.Y. Mr. Schrager recalled that the contractors kept turning over Mr. Liaigre’s furniture to see how the pieces were put together.

“His furniture was so refined, so beautiful and so well made,” Mr. Schrager said.

Mr. Pawson remembered meeting Mr. Liaigre just once — in a chance encounter at the Mercer. Both men were up early for breakfast.

“We were the only ones in the room,” Mr. Pawson said by email from his home on the island of Majorca in Spain. “We had a nice chat over a very minimal white egg, tea and toast.”

Before working on the Mercer, Mr. Liaigre had designed the interiors of the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, a boutique hotel built in the 1920s and redone in 1990. At that time, boutique hotels, as pioneered by Mr. Schrager, were over-the-top theaters, designed most notably by Philippe Starck and Andrée Putman.

“They were extremely sexy, but they were not an intimate, personal style,” David Netto, an American designer, said in a phone interview. “The Hotel Montalembert was like a revelation. You walked in and saw the possibility of how to decorate that hadn’t been around since the 1930s. African sculptures next to Louis XV furniture, the neutrality of the architecture.”

He added, “People were beguiled by that hotel.”

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The lobby of the Mercer in SoHo, which introduced Mr. Liaigre to the United States when it opened in 1997.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Christian Liaigre was born on Aug. 10, 1943, in La Rochelle, France. His father was a veterinarian, and his grandfather bred horses. Christian worked for his grandfather for a decade after attending the École des Beaux-Arts and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

He is survived by his wife, Deborah Comte-Liaigre; their son, Leonard; and a granddaughter. His daughter, Virginie, died last year.

Mr. Liaigre’s design roots were French Modernism, Asian furniture, African art and riding hardware — bridles, saddles and stirrups. Many compared him to Jean-Michel Frank, the early French minimalist, but “with less ennui,” as Mitchell Owens, the decorative arts editor at Architectural Digest, said in an interview.

“Liaigre’s work had a butchness to it,” he added. “It was very male and very architectural.”

Decades earlier, Mr. Owens had interviewed Mr. Liaigre about how his upbringing had influenced his work. He recapped the interview on Instagram:

“We talked of his childhood near La Rochelle, his potent memories of his veterinary surgeon father’s tools and of accompanying him from farm to farm throughout the Vendee, his respect for woodworkers and love of chestnut and oak trees, and his belief in furniture that, no matter how reductivist, held the whiff of the terroir in its design.”

Former employees described Mr. Liaigre as a quiet, meticulous teacher whose drawings were always perfectly to scale. “He felt that to get the proportions right, the only way to do it was by hand,” said Kirstin Bailey, a designer in Mr. Liaigre’s studio in the 1990s.

Mr. Liaigre sold his company to a group of investors in 2016.

“To say that he was detail-oriented would be a gross understatement,” Mr. Balazs of the Mercer wrote in an Instagram post. “‘Obsession’ would be far more apt.”

Penelope Green is a feature writer in the Style department. She has been a reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Manhattan. More about Penelope Green

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Christian Liaigre, Minimalist Designer, Dies at 77. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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