With his extraordinary piece of furniture, the designer Marco Dessí has reimagined Dagobert Peche’s 1913 salon cupboard, which is part of the MAK Furniture Collection. Peche’s original design, which can be seen in the MAK Permanent Collection Vienna 1900, is an unconventionally proportioned, fourdoor cupboard made of black-stained pear wood, which appears to dance on eight delicately curved legs and which is adorned with gilded bouquets of flowers.
Dessí studied Peche’s cupboard closely and singled out the features that, in his opinion, were central to making it so unique and enthralling. He then combined them with his own aesthetic using contemporary means of production: the birch plywood body was produced with a CNC lathe before being stained yellow; the legs, made of steel tubing, were given a powder coating—also in yellow. As background he used a wallpaper designed by Peche in 1920 .
Marlies Wirth,curator MAK
