Le Roi: Why Marc Ange Gave a Four-Metre Teddy Bear a Crown It Cannot Wear

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 10 min

For Milan Design Week 2018, Marc Ange built a four-metre teddy bear a throne room it could never quite occupy. Sunbrella’s fabric covered every surface, from the bear’s blue skin to the walls of the elevated altar around it, while a crown and a sceptre sat on the ground, just out of reach. The installation, staged for Wallpaper* Handmade, was a study in scale and denial dressed as a fairy tale, and it built directly on the pink daybed that had made Ange’s name a year before.

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Marc Ange returned to Salone del Mobile in April 2018 with Le Roi, a garden installation staged in the grounds of the Mediateca di Santa Teresa for Wallpaper* Handmade, the magazine’s annual pairing of designers with makers and manufacturers. The centrepiece was a teddy bear standing roughly four metres tall, its entire surface wrapped in deep blue Sunbrella fabric, its eyes carved from marble and streaked with a single tear rendered in gold. Its crown and sceptre lay on the ground beneath it, out of its reach, and an elevated room behind the bear, also dressed in Sunbrella fabric from floor to ceiling, functioned as a kind of altar visitors could climb into and rest against the bear’s flank.

The installation ran through Salone del Mobile, which took place from 17 to 22 April 2018 and drew more than 434,000 visitors to Milan over its six days. It marked Ange’s second consecutive year inside Wallpaper* Handmade’s Mediateca garden, following Le Refuge in 2017, and his first project made in partnership with Sunbrella rather than The Invisible Collection, the gallery that had launched him the year before.

Read as a single object, Le Roi is a striking piece of theatre. Read as a sequel, it is a considered piece of design thinking: a designer taking a formula that had worked, changing every material variable that mattered, and using a fabric brand’s entire colour and performance range to do it.

What Le Roi actually was

The bear sat, or rather loomed, at the centre of a garden space, sized so that an adult visitor could rest against its stomach or perch on its thigh, the kind of scale relationship a child has with a favourite soft toy rather than the other way around. Every surface of the bear was upholstered in Sunbrella’s deep blue performance fabric, chosen to read as a saturated, almost midnight colour against the greenery and white stone detailing of the garden. Its eyes, carved from marble, carried a single tear finished in gold leaf, catching light differently depending on where a visitor stood.

Behind and around the bear, an elevated platform dressed entirely in the same blue fabric, walls, floor and ceiling alike, created an interior the installation’s own logic suggested was meant for the bear rather than for its visitors. Gold leaf lamps lined the path through the garden, guiding movement towards the platform, and two of Ange’s Les Araignées armchairs, also upholstered in Sunbrella fabric, sat near the base of the throne. The bear’s crown and sceptre were placed on the ground, deliberately unreachable from where the bear itself stood or sat, a detail that did the installation’s narrative work without a single word of wall text.

From pink to blue, from daybed to throne

Le Roi’s most immediate context is the installation it followed. In 2017, also inside the Mediateca di Santa Teresa garden for Wallpaper* Handmade, Ange presented Le Refuge, an oversized daybed with a canopy of stylised palm fronds, upholstered in a candy pink that stood out sharply against the fair’s usual palette of neutrals and metal. Wallpaper* itself later described Le Refuge as one of the most photographed pieces of that year’s Salone, a reputation built as much on its colour as on its scale.

Le Roi kept the scale and the setting, and changed almost everything else. Pink gave way to a deep, saturated blue. A daybed built for comfort gave way to a throne room built around a figure who is denied comfort, at least in the terms the installation sets out. Brass and white stone replaced the tropical greenery of the year before. Where Le Refuge invited a visitor to lie down and imagine shelter, Le Roi invited a visitor to look at a figure who cannot quite claim the shelter, or the sovereignty, built for it. The two installations share a designer, a venue and a scale of ambition. They do not share a mood, and that contrast is deliberate: a returning artist changing the emotional register of the work rather than repeating a formula that had already succeeded once.

The bear that cannot wear its own crown

The strongest thing Le Roi does is spatial rather than decorative. A crown resting on the ground, next to a figure built at a scale that makes picking it up look plausible and yet somehow does not happen, turns an ordinary object into a piece of narrative architecture. The installation never explains itself. It simply arranges scale, material and distance so that the story tells itself: a figure built to be a king, dressed for the part in gold leaf and rich colour, positioned next to the two objects that would confirm the role, and unable, or unwilling, to close that last short distance.

That is also why the elevated platform matters as much as the bear itself. A throne room implies a king who occupies it. Here, the room is dressed, lit and finished to the same standard as the bear, and visitors, not the bear, are the ones who climb into it. The installation’s central figure is permanently on the outside of its own throne room, which is a more exact way of describing “a lost childhood” than any explanatory text could manage. Ange has spoken about wanting the space to invite each visitor’s own interpretation rather than supply one, and the arrangement of crown, sceptre and unreachable throne room is built to support exactly that kind of open reading.

Les Araignées: a chair built from a childhood fear

The two armchairs placed near the bear are not incidental furniture. Les Araignées, French for “the spiders,” is a seating line Ange has described as drawing directly on a fear he carried from his own childhood, translating that fear into a physical form rather than illustrating it literally. The result reads, at a glance, as a conventional upholstered armchair with slender metal legs, available in powder-coated or plated finishes and dressed in whichever fabric a project calls for. Look at the proportion of those legs against the seat, though, and the reference becomes legible: a body raised on thin, splayed supports, closer to something that might scuttle than something that was designed purely to sit in.

That detail changes what Le Roi is actually built from. This is not a generic fairy tale populated with off-the-shelf furniture. The chairs sitting at the foot of a throne about a lost childhood are themselves objects built from one specific childhood fear, given a permanent, saleable form two years earlier and then folded into a much larger installation about the same territory. The bear supplies the allegory in one register, at the scale of the room; the chairs supply it in another, at the scale of an object a visitor can sit in and take home. Few visitors photographing the bear would have known that the chairs beside it carried the same autobiography in miniature, which is exactly the kind of detail that rewards a second look at Ange’s work rather than a first one.

Refuge: the lamps that link both installations

The gold leaf lamps threading through the garden and marking the route into the throne room carry the name Refuge, a direct continuation of the vocabulary Ange established with Le Refuge in 2017. The original Refuge lamps were built from aluminium with bases carved from marble sourced in Tuscan quarries, a pairing of an engineered material and a raw, geological one that has stayed consistent across Ange’s practice. For Le Roi, the studio introduced a new gold leaf finish, extending a piece that already existed into a colour and material register that matched the installation’s blue and brass palette rather than the pink it had originally been built for.

That kind of reuse and adaptation, rather than a wholly new object for every project, is a fairly reliable sign of a genuine design practice rather than a one-off stunt built for a fair. A lamp with a name and a material logic that can absorb a new palette without losing its identity is a piece that has been designed properly the first time.

Marc Ange, from automotive design to Bloom Room

Marc Ange was born in Rome in 1978 and moved to France at the age of five. He trained at the ESDI design school in Paris, graduating in 2002, and began his career as an automotive designer working in Turin, the Italian city that has anchored car design for the better part of a century. He founded his own studio, Bloom Room, in Paris in 2008, and has since worked across furniture, interiors and installation for clients including Louis Vuitton, Ferrari and Cassina, alongside his own gallery-facing pieces.

Ange has described his own aesthetic as built on contrast: beauty enhanced by an element of horror, perfection allowed to exist through a deliberate imperfection. He attributes that instinct partly to a genuinely mixed upbringing, an Italian mother from an artistic Roman family, a father from a Sicilian, French and Spanish background, and a move to France young enough to absorb a second culture rather than simply visit it. Le Roi, with its combination of gilded finish and a central figure denied the very crown built for it, sits comfortably inside that stated logic: a piece finished to a genuinely luxurious standard that is nonetheless built around an unresolved, faintly melancholic story rather than a straightforwardly celebratory one.

Why a fabric brand builds a throne room

Sunbrella’s core business is performance textile: fabric engineered since the 1960s to resist fading and degradation from sunlight, developed originally for awning canvas and now used across marine upholstery, outdoor furniture and increasingly indoor applications, manufactured at plants in South Carolina, France and China under parent company Glen Raven. None of that is naturally the stuff of Milan Design Week theatre, which is precisely the case for a project like Le Roi.

An installation built entirely from one fabric brand’s material, at a scale and in an application that has nothing to do with outdoor furniture, is a genuinely useful demonstration in a way a swatch book cannot be. Visitors who watched Sunbrella fabric wrapped around a four-metre sculptural form, stretched over walls, floor and ceiling of an elevated room, and upholstered onto a pair of sculptural armchairs, saw the material behave in contexts that have little to do with its usual specification. For a brand whose reputation rests on durability and colour retention rather than on sculptural association, lending its full material range to a designer already known for scale and narrative is a considerably more persuasive argument than another season of outdoor cushions.

Wallpaper* Handmade and the Mediateca garden

Wallpaper* Handmade is the magazine’s annual commissioning project, pairing designers, artists and architects with makers, craftspeople and manufacturers to produce a single bespoke piece each, rather than a themed group show built from existing stock. Staged across Milan Design Week and centred on the garden of the Mediateca di Santa Teresa in the years Le Roi and Le Refuge appeared there, the project had, by its tenth edition in 2019, produced close to 590 projects and paired more than a thousand collaborators over a decade. The 2018 edition carried the theme Wellness and Wonder, and Le Roi’s blend of luxurious material and an unresolved, quietly melancholic narrative sits closer to the wonder half of that brief than to any literal reading of wellness, which is a fair description of how loosely Wallpaper*’s own themes tend to be interpreted by the designers working within them.

The garden setting matters to how both of Ange’s Mediateca installations read. A throne room built from fabric and gold leaf, planted among real greenery and white stone rather than inside a white-cube gallery space, reads less as a product launch and more as a fully staged environment, which is exactly the register Ange’s work across both years has been built to occupy.

Final thoughts

Le Roi could be described simply as a large, striking photo opportunity, and on the day, for many visitors moving through the Mediateca garden, that is exactly what it was. Looked at properly, it is a more disciplined piece of work than that description allows: a designer who had already proven a formula in 2017 returning a year later and changing the material, the colour and the emotional register while keeping the scale and the setting, then building the whole thing from a fabric brand’s entire range rather than a single swatch.

The chairs at the foot of the throne are the clearest evidence of how deliberately built the piece was. Les Araignées was not furniture borrowed to dress a scene. It carried its own autobiography into a room built around a different but related one, and the fact that most visitors photographing the bear never clipped that connection is precisely what makes Ange’s practice worth a second look rather than a first glance. Le Roi is a story about a crown that stays just out of reach. It is also, underneath the gold leaf, a genuinely considered piece of material and narrative design, built by a designer whose furniture and installations keep returning to the same well of childhood material and finding something new to make from it each time.