Jean Perzel can boast of having revolutionized lighting. Almost a century after its creation, its workshop Parisian perpetuates a unique know-how, whose aesthetic signature Art Deco is now available in contemporary tones.
By Romain Rivière
Jean Perzel can rejoice: the heritage he left remains intact. This vision and know-how enabled him, through hard work, to revolutionize lighting nearly a century ago. This building too, the one he ordered from Michel Roux-Spitz in 1931 to install his workshop and manufacturing space, facing the Montsouris park, in the heart of Paris, where the company is still located. There, the greatest decorators and crowned heads, as well as private individuals, are received by Olivier Raidt, grand nephew of Jean Perzel and representative of the third generation of the family at the head of the company.
What do they come for? Exceptional lighting fixtures, both objects of art and technology, with an Art Deco aesthetic signature that gives them an eternal modernity. “Art Deco is for us a real family imprint, much more than a simple aesthetic orientation,” says Olivier Raidt. A mark that pushed him, at the time of developing new creations, to keep the purity and the efficiency of the lines and to apply a chromatic range of nine contemporary tones, able to register Jean Perzel in its time without cutting back on the original values.
These values, carried by the craftsmen perpetuating the tradition, are those of the highest standards of quality and efficiency. The ones that require 50, 100 or even 150 hours of work from the best glass, bronze or sandblasting workers to produce one of the thousand lights that leave the workshop each year. And they are the ones who direct the choice of materials towards the best bronzes – essential component of each creation – and the best glasses. “Here, everything is done by hand,” insists Olivier Raidt, pointing to the workbenches in his workshop, equipped with tools from the early days. “Each piece is numbered and signed. There are no visible screws or glue. The adjustment is done with a file,” he says.
If the company strives to apply flawless quality to its lighting fixtures, contrary to any mass production, it is because it has built its reputation. And if Jean Perzel’s lighting fixtures dress yachts, jets, palaces and the most beautiful apartments in the world, it is not by chance. This is the result of the work carried out by the founder since the 1920s. At that time, the young glassmaker simply invented modern lighting, applying to his work what he had learned from the study of lighting, light and the laws of optics. Before the others, he managed to create modern lighting devices, based first of all on the intensity, the means of use, the powers and the nature of electricity, which he tamed to make it capable of highlighting objects and faces by the intensity and the color of the light. His motto: to attach particular importance to the soothing or harmful effects for the eye of this light which is used, until now, without method.
Over time, and with the help of his nephew François Raidt, he refined the line of the models he created, drawing his inspiration from the Art Deco movement, so that the simplicity and purity of his creations would forever be synonymous with modernity. Pioneer in the field, Jean Perzel, the first, gives to lighting the breath that allows it to evolve with its time and to be in phase with the progress and the comfort of a modern society in total break with the past.
