Art Deco cabinet

Every accomplished craftsperson holds trade secrets close. Meticulous techniques require long hours of trial and error, while supreme materials depend on trusted relationships with the suppliers who mine, grow, or forge them to exacting specifications year after year.

When it comes to such craftsmanship, the husband-and-wife furniture-making team of Yann and Sandra Jallu in Brittany, France, is no exception. First meeting when Yann was the chief cabinet maker at the the Art Deco–infused Atelier Viollet in Brooklyn, they now produce exquisite custom-made furniture from gypsum—or “gypse” as it is known in French.

Gypsum—or selenite—is the crystalline raw mineral from which common plaster is ground. It’s a counterintuitive material for fine furniture. Unaffected by humidity, it is as forgiving as it is beautiful.

“I can’t say where we found our gypse,” explains Sandra, an artist from New York who designs Jallu Eb?nistes’ major pieces. “We spent a year scouring the world for the right purity and quality of refraction.”

That year, Jallu Eb?nistes invested in sourcing because it was smitten with a design classic. An early apostle of minimalism, Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941) pioneered furniture with panels of gypsum. His strikingly refined patinated bronze cabinet from circa 1935 was part of the celebrated F?lix Marcilhac Collection until it was sold at Sotheby’s in 2014. The estimate was €400,000 to €600,000 ($470,620–$705,930), yet its beauty and importance escalated the bidding to €3,681,500 ($4,330,753). (War broke out 4 years after the unique piece was made, so Frank had no design successor in the years of austerity that followed.)

The success of minimalism is usually contingent on invisible technical solutions. Extruded brass is delivered to their workshop for the armature, within which the precisely shaped panels are set. They tested adhesives for a year to check for discoloration—one reject tinged the gypsum green. Since the finished panels weigh some 9 pounds per square foot, the design must be balanced so that the opened doors do not tip the cabinet forward. Made-to-order pieces start at €18,750 ($21,700).