Steel and Leather Magazine Rack, in the Style of Jacques Adnet, French, circa 1950

Jacques Adnet (1900–1984) was among the most influential figures of French mid-century interior design: twin brother of Jean Adnet and, from 1928, director of the Compagnie des Arts Français — the prestigious decorating firm founded by Louis Sué and André Mare in 1919 — which he led until 1959. His signature was the integration of hand-stitched saddle leather with steel tubular frames, a vocabulary drawn from the world of the harness-maker and the tack room: an equestrian grammar transposed into the modernist interior. The result was a warm, craft-inflected modernism that set his work apart from both the austerity of pure industrial design and the heaviness of traditional upholstered furniture.

The leather-steel combination at the heart of Adnet’s aesthetic carried a particular cultural charge in post-war France. Leather — especially the tan saddle leather of the French saddlery tradition, with its hand-stitched joints and slowly acquired patina — evoked a world of pre-industrial craft and durability. Steel — precise, structural, modern — provided the armature. Together they created objects standing at the intersection of artisanal tradition and industrial modernity, embodying the characteristic ambiguity of French mid-century culture: attached to craft and beauty, convinced of progress and function.

This magazine rack, in steel and leather in the manner of Adnet, belongs to the lineage of that vocabulary. At 45 cm wide, 25 cm deep and 53.5 cm tall, the proportions are well-judged: upright enough to hold a generous stack of magazines, compact enough for placement beside an armchair or at the end of a desk. A characteristic expression of the Adnet aesthetic applied to an object of everyday domestic use.