by designer James Mont
a Carved Oak and Bamboo End Cabinet
circa 1954
With its strong segmented face, curved, linear and cycloptic, and with its gentle grey-blue, silver-browed and mottled skin, this one-of-a-pair work stands as monumental in stature as l’Arc de Triomphe itself, though in miniature. Recently swathed in renewed polish and re-touchings, the cabinet’s figure dominates the space with a steady, firm-footed confidence fit to elegantly wing (rather like a shoulder pad) the side of any equally charming bed, desk or canapé, independent of whether the styles of the furniture match or not. Designed to appear nearly solid, with its silhouette slim of any suggestion to its cavernous insides, this piece in fact houses an upper (frowning) drawer and a hinged, circular-handled doorway, each giving way to handsome and dark inner linings of bare oak. And additionally, with each cabinet’s brow leafed in an Edgar Brandt-esque net of framed woven silver, there results an undying shimmer inherent to the cabinet’s outlook - rather as how each dawn and sunset plays with the stone face of l’Arc de Triomphe.
