We’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the design and construction of classic French ranges. Up through the 20’s, French ranges were the rage in upscale American kitchens… the more heavy and ornate, the better. This picture of a early 1890’s Wehrl Company gas range is one of the most beautifully ornamented cookers we’ve ever seen.
The 2009 Sirha show opened January 24th in Lyon, France; and for the first time we had an exhibit there. A customized Delaubrac 48″ range and a customized CLP Design production line range hood were shown as the centerpiece of Solymac’s display. We worked on a textured finish with an interference paint job for the range to offset a set of brushed nickel trim.
The Solymac brand has been known for going all-out on displays in the past, commissioning well-known French painters to create photorealistic paintings on the faces of their displays and building futuristic island stoves, and we wanted to be sure to uphold the tradition. Although we started out with a much different plan for this display, involving metal ornament overload like we prefer on our hoods, we decided in the end to go for this deceptively simple look. The rough faux plaster texture looks straightforward… until you walk by the stove and see the play of colors in it. Walking by the range and hood, especially under bright trade-show-lighting, strokes of red, green and purple appear and fade back into the textured finish. This picture doesn’t do it justice at all. Ah well…
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CLP Design is pleased to announce its new partnership with Solymac International, manufacturers of the Delaubrac line of residential ranges. CLP Design Ranges, a newly-created division of CLP Design, will now be distributing the Delaubrac line throughout the Americas.
Solymac is one of the top tier of manufacturers of French culinary equipment, with a solid and respected history in Europe. However, the brand has very little name recognition in America, despite its history of producing components for other better-known manufacturers such as La Cornue (until the mid-90’s, La Cornue’s cooktops were manufactured by Solymac). Among the distinguishing characteristics of the Delaubrac line are a true chassis-style contruction (the entire range is built on a structural frame of tube steel, none of the visible parts are load-bearing), the largest interior oven dimensions of any comparable French range, and a solid brass vent junction and chimney.
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Last week we took the call from a designer who’s building a Florida house styled after a turn of the century French mansion. The reference photo for the kitchen equipment comes from this photo of a 1912 Fourneau Baudon island range currently housed at the Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris.
Now aside from the fact that this era and style is one of our greatest passions, our first reaction was sheer wonder at the beauty of the engineering and construction of this range. We pride ourselves on knowing as much as anybody does about the history and aesthetic of French ranges, but this was one we hadn’t seen before. When we looked more carefully at the picture, though, a few things began to stick out.
This mansion, built for the Comte Moïse de Camondo by architect Réne Sergent, was itself built down to the details after an earlier mansion—Marie Antoinette’s palace in Versailles, the Petit Trianon. Almost the entire design for the Camondo building could have come straight from the 1780’s, with the exception of this piece of cooking equipment. Obviously the client was passionate enough about his kitchen, and apparently passionate enough about this particular range, to break the continuity of the rest of his design to fit this modern construction into it.
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