Art Deco Cabinet/Sideboard by Jacques Adnet

A finely proportioned French Art Deco sideboard by Jacques Adnet, c.1930–1935, executed in palissandre (Brazilian rosewood) veneer French-polished to a deep mirror finish with a strong crimson undertone and pronounced ribbon-grain figure. The case is built as a tripartite composition: a central tower of three graduated drawers flanked by a pair of full-height cupboard doors, raised on a shallow shaped plinth and rounded at the ends in a continuous curved palissandre panel. Hardware is reduced to five flush-set chromed-metal pulls of elongated cartouche form, providing the only ornament against the otherwise unbroken figured veneer.

A textbook example of Adnet's reductive moderniste vocabulary at the Compagnie des Arts Français, where the art décoratif tradition of figured French veneers meets the architectural restraint of polished chromed metal and softly radiused corners. The piece sits comfortably alongside contemporary work by Jean-Michel Frank, Eileen Gray and the early modern moment of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, while preserving the warm material richness that distinguished Adnet's domestic interiors of the 1930s.

A buffet of this scale is the centrepiece of an Art Deco dining room — equally at home as a long console in a contemporary salon, where its mirror-polished palissandre surface and reductive geometry read as cleanly today as in 1930.

Designer note: Adnet (1900–1984) directed the Compagnie des Arts Français from 1928, succeeding founders Louis Süe and André Mare, and pushed French art décoratif toward modernism through the 1930s and 1940s. He is best known internationally for his post-1947 collaborations with Hermès on saddle-stitched leather-clad furniture. His work is held in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and the Mobilier National.