Mathieu Lehanneur on slow ideas, lasting objects, and his new monograph

Mathieu Lehanneur’s research is concerned with the relationship between the body and its surroundings. He graduated from ENSCI–Les Ateliers in Paris in 2001 and opened a practice the same year, working with objects designed for health and wellbeing – with a focus on improving daily conditions of living with illness. Biology, demographic data, and the behaviour of water and stone have been a constant source of inspiration in his practice since, across furniture, interiors, sculptural pieces, and large commissions for public space.

Since 2018, Mathieu Lehanneur operates under his eponymous brand, which looks after every step of the design ecosystem entirely in-house:  from ideation, to development, production, through to finished object. Many of his pieces push the boundaries of materiality – stone that reads as liquid, surfaces that look poured rather than cut. The operation runs from The Factory, a former electricity station in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris, and since 2024, also from a duplex penthouse on East 53rd Street in Manhattan, called the Pied-a-Terre. With ideation, prototyping, and assemble kept close together under one roof in Ivry, a finished piece is worked out through testing, and not just designed on paper and computer models.

Alongside collectors pieces, the studio works on public commissions. In February 2023, after a call for tenders, the Paris 2024 Organising Committee famously named Mathieu Lehanneur designer of the Olympic and Paralympic torch and cauldron;  the cauldron – a hot air balloon in hues of gold – rose over the Tuileries every evening for the duration of both Games, and remains indelibly etched in Paris’ collective memory. Lehanneur’s pieces are held in several museums collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and MoMA. Maison&Objet made him Designer of the Year in 2024.  Mathieu Lehannery will return to Park Avenue Armory this November for Salon Art + Design.

His first monograph with Phaidon, titled simply Mathieu Lehanneur, goes on sale on 22 October. It runs to 248 pages and 80 projects, from objects and interiors to public commissions, grouped into ten chapters that each take up a principle rather than a period or a product category. Alongside finished photography the book carries preliminary studies, models, renders, manufacturing shots, and press clippings, so the projects are explained in depth from ideation through to presentation. Notably, Spencer Bailey wrote the foreword, Anne Bony and Constance Rubini contributed texts, and the journalist Lucie Weeger a conversation with the designer.

Here, hube spoke to Lehanneur about how an idea takes physical form, the process behind the objects, and new territories and areas of research he’s looking to explore in the future.

hube: Your work moves between objects, interiors, and larger architectural projects. What remains constant in your approach when the scale changes so dramatically?

Mathieu Lehanneur: Whatever the scale, what interests me is what a work can do to us. What happens in the mind of someone who encounters an object or enters a space? Beyond aesthetics and form, I am looking for that almost magical capacity to affect us—to transform us.

h: You have described letting an idea mature in your mind until it is strong enough, and only then drawing it, before plans and prototypes follow. How long does an idea usually wait, and how do you know when it is ready to take physical form?

ML: Sometimes an idea comes very quickly, but even then I take the time to let it live—and, so to speak, to let it age—in my mind. I revisit it for a few minutes each day, for a week or two, sometimes several months. I watch whether it grows, like a plant you water day after day, or gradually fades away on its own.

I know an idea is ready when it feels stronger each time I return to it. In a sense, I apply a form of natural selection to ideas: I give each a chance, then see which proves strongest or the most relevant to what I want to create.

h: Your new self-titled monograph Mathieu Lehanneur, on sale from 22 October, is organized into ten chapters, each built around a principle of your work. How did you arrive at these principles, and was there one you had not put into words before the book?

ML: I did not begin with ten principles and then create work to fit them. The work came first. Making this book allowed me to recognise and name the approaches that had emerged over twenty-five years. When I’m working on a project, I never think about which category it belongs to.

One discovery was the final chapter, The Convergence of Obsessions, which focuses on the Olympic torch and cauldron. Looking back at them through the book, I realised they brought together all nine themes explored in the preceding chapters, and that they concentrate everything that has interested me for years.

I hope readers will discover those connections too—not only what I have made, but what has kept me searching.

h: The monograph offers a closer look at how your projects develop. Design books often present finished objects as if the process behind them were clear and direct. What do you think is most often misunderstood about the way you work? Was there a part of your process you wanted the book to reveal that people rarely get to see?

ML: What feeds my work rarely comes from design itself. It comes from mineralogy, biology, physics, or tiny details in nature. These are the raw materials of my imagination. Through the monograph, I wanted readers to glimpse those sources—to understand how much of my work begins far outside the boundaries of design.

h: From Petite Loire at Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire to the choir of Saint-Hilaire Church, some of your projects become part of a place for decades. Others are collectible pieces that can move between homes, galleries, and fairs. Does the idea of permanence change the way you design? And what responsibility comes with making something that will outlast its original context?

ML: The priest who commissioned me to create the choir for the church of Saint-Hilaire in Melle was the first person to put this question to me. As the project was coming to an end, he said: “Mathieu, are you aware that what you’ve created will be seen not only by your children, but by your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and probably far beyond that?”

The idea that what we create can outlast us is quite dizzying. For me, what holds true in a church also applies to every project and piece I make. I often tell prospective clients: “The piece you’re about to buy will live longer than you.”

That is a responsibility, even a kind of mission. I want to create things that speak about us while we are alive, and can go on speaking about us when we are no longer here.

h: Which project in the book would you ask someone to look at first if they knew nothing about your work, and why that one?

ML: I would suggest looking at Tomorrow Is Another Day, a project I created a few years ago for a hospital palliative care unit, where people spend their final days.

It takes the form of a porthole containing a screen that continuously shows what tomorrow’s sky will look like anywhere in the world. It is full of technology, but what it offers is, in a sense, the experience of living one more day. Even if you are going to die today, you will still know what tomorrow will look like.

It also creates a connection with the people you love. By choosing the sky above the place where your friends, children, or parents live, you can feel close to them during those final days. Bringing a sky into a room can open us to a certain kind of spirituality, whether or not we are religious.

h: You are returning to Salon Art + Design at the Park Avenue Armory this November. What are you presenting this year, and what do you want the audience to experience beyond the individual pieces? When you design an exhibition, how much does the space change the meaning of the objects within it?

ML: I love Salon Art + Design because it is a chance to see friends, clients, and loyal collectors. The Park Avenue Armory is a splendid setting, but for me the fair is above all a place for encounters.

This year, many of the new pieces explore a material I deliberately left aside for a long time: wood. Although it is deeply rooted in the history of furniture, I am interested in how today’s tools can help us rediscover it.

There will be a new table combining wooden legs with marble; a cabinet called Paradise, which looks almost as if it were carved from a single block; and a sofa that plays with the idea of taking molecules and putting them in a box. That may sound abstract, but I invite you to come and discover it yourselves.

h: Your work often brings together materials such as marble and blown glass, each with its own limits and possibilities. Can you recall a moment when working with a craftsperson changed your understanding of a material or led you in an unexpected direction? How much of the final design comes from your original vision, and how much emerges through making?

ML: I remember calling the glassblower I had been working with for years and asking: “Do you think we could place an enormous weight—one hundred kilos, two hundred, five hundred—on a blown glass bubble?” From my knowledge of glass, I suspected it could work, but I wanted his opinion. “I think you’re right,” he said, “but we have to try.”

Two days later, I received a short video from his workshop. He had blown a beautiful glass bubble and was adding weights: ten kilos, then twenty, then fifty, then a hundred. He reached almost three hundred kilos on a single bubble.

That is often how my relationship with craftspeople works. It begins with an intuition grounded in my knowledge of materials, followed by a long journey together to make it possible. The hardest part is bringing the finished object back to the simplicity of that first intuition. All the technical complexity, all the tools, must disappear so that only the purity of the original idea remains. That is when, I think, the material reaches a kind of magical state.

h: You work across craft and technology, but neither seems to be an end in itself. How do you decide which tools or technologies a project actually needs? Have you ever abandoned a technically impressive solution because it made the idea less clear, or found that a simple technique could do something more interesting?

ML: I try not to be dazzled by tools or technology. Their precision and power can be fascinating, but what matters most is the final result.

When I wanted to recreate waves in marble, I was trying to capture the intensity of standing before the sea—its energy—in a hard material such as marble or bronze. My team and I ran countless tests. We even tried to cast moving water. It was a failure. After years of research, we found the solution in software capable of recreating what you might call the equation of water in motion.

I had never imagined that I would have to go through computer programming to return to the material. Sometimes you need the freedom and openness to explore all kinds of techniques before reaching what you were looking for from the start.

h: What questions or challenges are occupying the studio at the moment? Are there any projects in development that are pushing your practice into unfamiliar territory, whether through a new material, a different scale, or a new kind of collaboration?

ML: I am currently working with a genetic research institute. It is too early to discuss the project, but the invitation itself is exciting. More and more, I am approached by people whose work lies far outside the usual fields of design, as it was with a priest and a hospital director. To me, these collaborations suggest a growing openness to what design can contribute beyond its traditional boundaries.

h: After more than twenty years of practice, what still feels unexplored to you? Is there a material, a field, or a type of project you have wanted to work with for a long time but have not yet found the right reason to pursue? What would make you take that step now?

ML: School, without a doubt. I was often bored at school, and it was only after I had left that I came to appreciate its beauty and its power. When I say school, I mean everything from the building to the pen, including the furniture, the layout of the classroom, and the lighting.

Learning involves the mind, of course, but also concentration, the body, posture, and our place within a group. I believe there are things we could introduce early on—not necessarily expensive or complicated—to give every pupil the best possible chance to find pleasure in learning.

Yet in a classroom, we ask children to remain still for hours, sitting on a chair at a desk. I believe there is still so much to invent to give both body and mind the best possible conditions for learning—and for finding pleasure in it. That is something I would very much like to explore next.