Petite Friture: bringing panache to patios

Not so long ago, the choice of garden furniture was limited to a few pre-ordained styles: bistro-style tables, chairs made from white latticed ironwork, teak-slatted everything and blocky patio sofas and armchairs made from synthetic rattan and all-weather beige padding. Moves to blur the lines between our furnishings indoors and outdoors, boosted by enforced hosting under open skies over the past two years, has, however, opened up a whole new playground for our imagination.

With outdoor furniture specialists loosening up aesthetics to allow for creative curating outside as inside, while more generalist furniture design brands adapt their existing portfolio and new offerings to weather life in the back yard, the potential for exteriors to be honed to individual tastes and made as liveable as the living room is vast.

‘The last two years were full of surprises, driven by urgency and centred on the essentials; improving the comfort of our homes, setting up our outdoor spaces in order to spend quality time with friends and family,’ says Amelie du Passage, founder of Petite Friture, an independent-minded furniture and home accessories brand from France that represents that second category of manufacturers.

It is now looking to integrate existing designs for the interior with those for the exterior, grow the number of pieces that are suitable for outside use and unify the two aesthetics. ‘Needs have changed for the consumer and our priorities are to meet these new needs in terms of quality, design and sustainability while not neglecting our singularity and ambition to arouse emotion and create virtuous beauty.’

Petite Friture is characterised by a positive, joyful outlook and known for its melding of designs from established and emerging designers from around the world, sourced and championed by du Passage. With a wide pool of contributors, its offerings are eclectic, but work together. ‘Petite Friture is at the heart of many stories, written by many hands. Our role is to gather all of these mini-narratives together and combine them to create the Petite Friture story.’ says du Passage. It’s exactly this quality that makes it an interesting contributor to the new narrative for outdoor design.

Quasar, the brand’s latest launch is the work of Samy Rio, a young French designer who caught Amelie’s attention at Villa Noailles’s Design Parade event in 2015, where his prize-winning showpiece explored the potential industrialisation of bamboo. Quasar is a chargeable light, made from anodised aluminium and with a cord loop for hanging, but it still speaks of Rio’s fascination for the line drawn between craft and industrialisation, and for balancing the technical and useful with the playful. Nomadic by nature, it can move around a residence, inside and out, both functionally and aesthetically.

The new piece, available in five well-researched shades, is also honed to work with both of the brand’s existing outdoor design offerings – Week-End, a full range of outdoor furniture by French studio BrichetZiegler that Petite Friture has edited since 2017, and Fromme, a stackable chair made from aluminium with an anti-UV powder coating, designed by young Canadian designer, Tom Chung. Also a keen cyclist, Chung was inspired by bike design and rides up Fromme mountain outside Vancouver. Pieces from both collections mix easily and are available in a generous palette of colours that allows for this new freedom in the styling of exterior spaces.

With attitudes to outside design even going so far as to incorporate the open-plan backlash and the alternative ‘broken-plan’ layout that lockdown inspired, there is certainly the need for more than a few Baroque iron twirls to define and characterise our rooms under the stars. Thankfully, a growing palette of colour, texture and styles available for exteriors is starting to make the refinement and individualisation of our patios possible.

© Architonic