Invited by Paris Design Week, YMER&MALTA presented its work in September 2025 at the Orangerie of the Hôtel de Sully, an exceptional setting that highlighted the studio’s pioneering role in the revival of the ensemblier tradition.
Text by Marielle Brie de Lagerac
Art and Object Historian
Beyond creating interiors that reflected the tastes and spirit of their contemporaries, they also designed the unique and luxurious furniture and objects that inhabited them. The ensemblier is not a decorator. Their vocation extends far beyond the tasteful and original arrangement of furniture, objects, colors, and textures. Far more versed in the history of styles and nourished by a broad artistic, literary, musical, and later cinematic culture, the ensemblier of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a keen observer of their time, they designed the unique and luxurious furniture and objects that inhabited those spaces.
At the Orangerie of the Hôtel de Sully in Paris, visitors and collectors alike were invited to rediscover this renewed heritage. The Eagles Table, with its exquisite bog-oak marquetry, the À Fleur de Peau collection, a tribute to the tactile tension of saddle leather, the poetic and precious lighting pieces, and the Timeless marble clock together embodied the contours of a new French art de vivre: modern, elegant, and deeply refined. The studio’s distinctive ensemblier talent radiated through this historic venue, offering a chance to revisit the studio’s story and to appreciate its place within contemporary furniture and decorative arts.
EIDOS XXI: The Renaissance of the Ensemblier in the Twenty-First Century
In 2021 and 2022, Valérie Maltaverne and Benjamin Graindorge, in collaboration with the Atelier de Recherche et de Création of the Mobilier National, conceived a desk and a bookcase, an ideal workspace where form and material coexist in harmony, evoking a serene landscape conducive to reflection and reconnection with nature, a source of perpetual inspiration.
“An ode to serenity, the works of this office ensemble, at once powerful and weightless, as if suspended in space, come together in a game of truth, allowing the imagination to drift gently, and thus to create more freely.”
Cloé Pitiot,
Curator, Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris
This emblematic project marks the first true reemergence of the ensemblier profession in the twenty-first century. While other studios have since followed, YMER&MALTA remains a pioneer, designing since 2008 furniture and decorative art pieces as cohesive, aesthetic, and livable ensembles, blending editions from its various collections into harmonious compositions.
The Quintessential Parisian Ensemblier Studio
From light marbles and precious marquetry to saddle leathers, poetic lighting, immaculate porcelains, and revived tapestries, the hundred pieces composing YMER&MALTA’s collections coexist in perfect harmony. Each embodies the fleeting serenity of natural phenomena: the colored facets of light at sea, in the desert, or within a sunlit glade shimmer across the smooth modern surfaces of aged and precious woods, burnished by light and time. The compact, luxurious warmth of wool gives rise to three-dimensional tapestries that invite poetic reverie. Everyday objects acquire a timeless, quiet grace. Thus, the studio’s furniture and decorative artworks naturally inhabit all environments, from contemporary homes to historic residences. By shaping contemporary creation as an organic material, YMER&MALTA has infused the ensemblier craft with the spontaneous vitality of natural landscapes, ever beautiful, ever self-evident.
“YMER&MALTA reconnects with the great tradition of the universal exhibition pavilions as they existed up until the Second World War.”
Bruno Ythier,
Chief Heritage Curator, Cité internationale de la Tapisserie
