Croissant Sofa

Conceived in 1970 by French designer Raphaël Raffel for the storied Parisian workshop Maison Honoré, the "Croissant" sofa is among the most sought-after expressions of 1970s French curvilinear design. Its crescent-shaped silhouette — sculptural, enveloping, and entirely without right angles — was executed as a bespoke commission, each example hand-built to its original client's specifications. The result is a landscape-like seat of exceptional generosity, upholstered variously in leather, mohair velvet, bouclé, or alpaca depending on the commission, and prized today for its rarity and its total departure from orthogonal seating conventions. Produced in extremely limited numbers out of Maison Honoré's Paris atelier into the early 1980s, surviving examples surface only sporadically on the market and stand as a benchmark of postwar French collectible design, alongside contemporaries such as Michel Boyer and Jean Royère.