Britain made him a Royal Designer for Industry: Pierre Paulin

The distinction arrived five months after the funeral. In November 2009 Pierre Paulin, who had died in Montpellier that June, was named a Royal Designer for Industry — the British honour, given posthumously to a Frenchman who had spent fifty years refusing to treat seating as mere equipment. His own line for it was blunt: a chair should be more than simply functional. He had earned the right to say so the hard way, starting in a furniture workshop in the 1950s and ending with commissions for the French state, and in between he gave the Ribbon chair of 1966 and the Tongue of 1968 to a Dutch manufacturer who still makes them.

British projects meet him through one piece in particular. Osaka, drawn in 1967 and reissued by the Friulian maker laCividina, is a modular sofa of straight and curved units, built on a structure strengthened for heavy-traffic floors and filled with flame-retardant foam. Reception halls, waiting rooms and hotel lobbies specified through La Mercanti can therefore carry a signature a museum label would recognise.