When the doors open for the new Criteria furniture showroom in Melbourne this month, they’ll provide a unique portal to Paris. Behind a handsome Italianate facade on a South Yarra side street, a three-roomed gallery space has been conceived by French interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch and populated with his gently eccentric mobilier: the seating, tables and lighting that have made him a mainstay of the influential Architectural Digest AD100 list this past decade.

There’s his Asymmetry armchair, a slightly discombobulated cube shape typically upholstered in a rich wool bouclé. And his Mindy sofa, an elegantly elongated arc hewn from solid oak padded with feathers clad in linen and velvet. The Roze dining table rests on gaggles of flared steel legs lacquered a rusty red, a blob of lava-like ceramic anchoring its raw oak top.