Olivier Mourgue

Olivier Mourgue was a French designer whose soft, sculptural furniture helped define the look of the 1960s. He is best remembered for the Djinn collection, the low, undulating chairs and sofas that Stanley Kubrick chose for the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Upholstered in vivid red and set against the film's white interiors, they became one of the most recognisable images in cinema and turned a young Parisian furniture designer into an international name.

Mourgue was born in Paris in 1939. He trained at the École Boulle, where he studied interior design, and then at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, specialising in furniture. After his studies he gained early experience in Northern Europe, working in Finland and Sweden and spending time at Nordiska Kompaniet in Stockholm under Maurice Holland. That contact with Scandinavian design, with its simple forms, good materials and attention to everyday use, shaped the rest of his career.

His long collaboration with the French furniture maker Airborne began around the turn of the 1960s, after he presented his Joker seat to the company. In the mid-1960s (sources date the collection between 1963 and 1965) he designed Djinn, a family of fireside chairs, poufs, two-seat sofas, a chaise longue and a table. The pieces were among the first mass-produced seats built from a tubular steel frame padded with polyurethane foam and covered in a removable stretch jersey, offered in a range of colours. The name came from the jinn of Arab tradition, a shape-shifting spirit, which suited furniture that seemed to bend away from the rigid geometry of conventional chairs. When Kubrick began shooting 2001 in December 1965, red Djinn pieces were placed in the film's orbiting space station.

Mourgue's work went far beyond one famous chair. For Airborne he also created the Tric-Trac armchair, the Whist back-to-back seat (1964), which became popular in airport halls and waiting rooms, the Montreal series (1967) and the Bouloum, a reclining seat shaped like a human figure (1968 to 1969). His Cubique chair of 1968 won an AID International Design Award. He worked for the interior architecture agency Gautier-Delaye and was the interior designer of the French pavilions at Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 70 in Osaka.

In 1966 he opened his own studio at 9 rue Campagne-Première in Paris, which he kept until the late 1980s. From there he designed lighting for Disderot, including the Flower lamp (1970), collections for the department store chain Prisunic, work for Renault (including a restyling of the Renault 4), and furniture for the Mobilier national, the French state body that makes and keeps furniture for public buildings. A hallmark of his method was the replaceable coloured cover, which let owners change the character of a piece without replacing it.

In 1971 the German chemical company Bayer invited him to create Visiona 3, its experimental living environment on a boat at the Cologne Furniture Fair, following earlier editions by Verner Panton and Joe Colombo. Mourgue imagined a continuous landscape of carpets and fabrics evoking meadows, rivers and earth, with no conventional rooms. Bayer's open spaces and his fabrics were later taken up by several manufacturers, and Visiona 3 is still cited as a landmark of 1960s and 1970s design thinking.

In 1976 Mourgue left Paris and settled in Brittany, at Keralio in Plouguiel in the Trégor area of the Côtes-d'Armor. "I found my balance in the Trégor," he said. He became a teacher at the École des beaux-arts in Brest, where he taught until his retirement in the early 2000s, telling students that "everyone has an intelligence with their hands." He kept designing, including an apartment interior, a wooden church and a travel case for the Malian singer Rokia Traoré. His pieces are held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and original Djinn chairs remain highly sought after by collectors.

His younger brother Pascal Mourgue (1943 to 2014) was also a noted French designer.

Olivier Mourgue died on Monday 5 October 2026 at his home in Keralio, Plouguiel, where he had lived quietly for half a century. Le Monde reported his age as 87. The cause of his death has not been made public.