French Maison Jansen Bundle of Wheat Shaped Gilt Metal and Glass Top Side Table. Mid century modern design from the 1970s, a stunningly unique piece with rich bronze colors and delicate thin shapes. 

Size: 19 1/2 x 21 x 16 in. 

Maison Jansen was a French interior decoration office founded in 1880 by Dutch-born Jean-Henri Jansen. Jansen is considered the first truly global design firm, serving clients in Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East at its zenith. From its beginnings Maison Jansen combined traditional furnishings with influences of new trends including the Anglo-Japanese style, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Turkish (Ottoman) style. The firm trained designers to view not just a single item or room but the entire house as an extension of each aesthetic, focused on crafting both a lifestyle and a living space at once. Within ten years the firm had become a major purchaser of European antiques, and by 1890 had established an antique gallery as a separate company that acquired and sold antiques to Jansen’s clients and its competitors as well. In the early 1920s Jean-Henri Jansen approached Stéphane Boudin, who was then working in the textile trimming business owned by his father Alexandre Boudin, and brought him on board. Boudin’s attention to detail, concern for historical accuracy, and ability to create dramatic and memorable spaces led him to becoming one of their greatest directors, overseeing the significant expansion of the firm’s offices as well as their market. He also increased their manufacturing capacity, producing furniture of contemporary design as well as reproductions of the Louis XIV, Louis XVI, Directoire, and Empire styles. Throughout the interwar and World War II years the company readily embraced new movements, from Vienna Secession to Modernism to Art Deco. Maison Jansen provided services to the royal families of Belgium, Iran, and Serbia, and especially extravagant decorations were provided for Elsie de Wolfe and Lady Olive Baillie’s Leeds Castle in Kent, England. The firm’s most famous work was a project by Boudin and Paul Manno, the head of Jansen’s New York office, for the U.S. White House during the administration of John F. Kennedy that was considered a focal point of the “Camelot” aesthetic which emerged around them. In 1963 Jansen completed the interior of the motor yacht Chambel IV, now renamed Northwind II, which is one of the few remaining complete Jansen commissions. After Stéphane Boudin's death in 1967 colleague Pierre Delbée took over the business. Maison Jansen came under new ownership in 1979 but faced economic difficulties as well as disagreements among upper management, and finally closed for good in 1989. Their headquarters, located at 23, rue de l’Annonciation, has changed hands many times since then, and is now a pizzeria nestled in the heart of Passy, the wealthiest neighborhood in Paris.