Marc Newson at Château La Coste

From the early Lockheed Lounge, handmade with thin aluminum sheets, to Electra, a new monumental outdoor sculpture, the carefully curated selection of fourteen design pieces, spanning 4-decades, reflect Australian-born, London-based Marc Newson’s longstanding preoccupation with craft, experimentation, materials and scale. Set in the beautiful Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion at Château La Coste, the exhibition offers an opportunity to experience a selection of important works that have influenced contemporary design for four decades.

The Pavilion is set within the rolling green hills and vineyards of the Château La Coste property, its transparent glass the only subtle transition between indoors and outdoors, making the works inside feel a part of the surrounding landscape. The pavilion was the final project drawn by the Oscar Niemeyer, and his last gift to France, a country that was important to him for having welcomed him during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. There is a harmonious pairing between the curving, fluid forms of Niemeyer’s pavilion and the curving sculptural forms Newson’s work. The shiny aluminum lounge chair or the cell-like structure of the marble Low Voroni shelf, seem at home in Niemeyer’s organic-futurist vision. Like Niemeyer, Newson also like to play with empty space and “expressions of absence.” He writes, “I remain interested in the spaces you don’t see, and how they inform your perception of an object or product.” The Extruded Table 3 highlights this use of empty space. It’s moving, liquid form appears like a lightweight outline, despite it being made with a single block of marble. The cast-glass chairs seem to float within the space, the light from outside enhancing their transparency.

“As the exhibition reveals, I remain inspired by processes: not just the beauty and profound satisfaction with outcome, but also the deeply gratifying stages in between: the complex narrative imbued in every piece,” writes Newson. The designer is driven by the question of what materials can be made to do. The exhibition presents a chair and table realised in cloisonné enamel, an ancient decorative technique so painstaking it usually remains on small-scale objects. To achieve these pieces, Newson established a dedicated workshop in China to revive and stretch the tradition to new levels.

Electra is a monumental six-metre-high outdoor sculpture conceived over thirty years ago and only now unveiled for the first time. Positioned at the entrance driveway, it functions as both threshold and provocation. Newson has never shied from challenging himself and the materials at hand. As he writes, “Despite the aesthetically divergent pieces on display, one can, I believe, discern a legibility—a way to read, and connect, this broad and enlivening body of work.”

Marc Newson is on view at Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, until 21 June 2026.

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