Until he was eight years old, Emmanuel Delalain lived on a 35-foot wooden sailboat. “It sounds romantic, but in reality it was extremely cramped,” the French native recalls of the vessel, built by his father, that transported his family on trips around the world. But the experience forged a lasting impression.
Now a craftsman like his father, Delalain makes tables, dressers, and desks that are imbued with evidence of his seafaring youth. His Gabrielle steel desk, for instance, features wave-like ripples across the top. “It goes back to living on a boat. A smooth surface means there is no wind, and no wind means you aren’t moving, so my furniture always has texture.”
After Delalain’s family permanently dropped anchor—in Port Camargue, a French coastal town on the Mediterranean—he spent his formative years in his father’s boat repair shop. It was a treasure trove of wooden scraps, which he used to build his own vessels and go-karts. “I learned by experimenting,” he says. In 1989, Delalain moved to the States, where he landed a job building sets for music videos. A decade later, he founded his firm, Atelier Delalain, which produces high-end custom furniture, much of it sold at Profiles in the New York Design Center.
One of his signature pieces, the Marie-Cécile side table, evokes mid-20th-century design, with a boxy frame and masses of circular “dimples.” To create it, Delalain fashions the body from white oak, then draws a grid on all four sides, pressing an electric hand-gouge into the wood and carving out cherry-size semicircles. Once each side is dimpled, he removes the rough edges and remaining grid lines with a sanding tool, handpaints the piece, and then runs sandpaper along the exterior, exposing streaks of the white oak underneath. Finally, he adds hand-crafted drawers, knobs, and legs to complete the table, which ultimately takes about three weeks to make.
Delalain signs all his creations, viewing them as individual works of art instead of furniture. “The size of the dimples depends on my mood,” he says. “Sometimes, if I’ve had a bad day, I press harder, and the dimples get a little deeper.”
