W&I Design

The designers are indispensable within the firm. They adapt to industrial demand but are also true to the original spirit of the agency and to the demands of the Wilmotte & Associés architects for the design of the tailor-made objects required for their projects. They devote much of their time to “integrated design”.

The work mainly involves developing galleries and hotels (the Réserve Ramatuelle, the Lutetia in Paris, the Cheval Blanc in Saint-Tropez), specific lighting and furniture for museums (the Tribal Art department at the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Islamic Art Museum in Doha), town planning, projects involving the headquarters of major corporations (LVMH), and furnishing for a few private residences, which are seen as real research laboratories. Some of these products, designed for a specific place and client, are often published and featured in the manufacturer’s catalogue.

Furniture design was Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s first love and is still a major speciality at the Wilmotte & Industries studio. Tables, chairs, stools, sofas, armchairs, beds, bookcases, console tables, side tables, coffee tables, chests of drawers, coat racks, nests of tables, sideboards, screens, desks, bed legs, dressing tables… The firm has designed countless models for furniture retailers or for the needs of specific projects.

Over the past 15 years, two collections have stood out in particular: the Wilmotte collection, designed for the US designer Holly Hunt, going very much against the trend towards showy design and aspiring instead to timelessness and elegance in the great French tradition; and the Anatole collection, designed for the Istanbul company Koleksiyon, the result of wide-ranging research carried out on work spaces, to create customised, versatile and efficient environments to foster interaction and hybrid practices.

From the early 2000s, Wilmotte & Industries formed more and more partnerships in the world of home design: for the bathroom or kitchen, tableware, household appliances, door hardware, objects for the home… The aim is clearly to provide individual consumers and to project managers and architects a complete range of elements to complete interior areas, especially in accommodation and hotel projects: wash basins, baths, toilets for Teuco; bathroom fittings for Cristina and CEA; sink vanity units with Margraf; knives for La Forge de Laguiole; plates for Haviland and Pilivuyt; hobs, extractor hoods and oven housing units for La Cornue; light switches for Meljac…

Materials and finishes play an important part in this vision of global design and help towards the total coherence of a development project.

Fabrics are a material in their own right: a manufactured “product” to be sold, but above all the guarantee of a certain style to customise an interior and furniture. From an early age Jean-Michel Wilmotte grasped the wide-ranging possibilities offered by textile design: from the start of his career, in the mid-1970s, he was intrigued by textile creation and by the various weaving techniques, especially the Jacquard machine, and created a range of collections for Suzanne Fontan, Casal and the silk makers Jean Roze and Nobilis. In 2022, rejuvenating this form of craftsmanship, the Wilmotte & Industries studio developed a collection of tablecloths, table sets and napkins for Le Jacquard Français, as well as a collection of furnishing fabrics for Lelièvre Paris.

This taste for textile design can also be seen in the creation of carpets from the early 1980s and is continuing today with the development of several different collections.