This year marks the 100th birthday of an icon of early modern design: Eileen Gray’s Transat lounger. Essentially a fabric hammock suspended across a rectilinear hardware frame, the piece called E1027 was originally designed for her own house on the Cote d’Azur and has not, as the French say, pris une ride. But wrinkle-less as it may be, the Transat is soon to be joined by a bevy of other French design classics to fete their centenaries.

Pierre Chareau, architect of the ground-breaking glass-walled Maison de Verre of 1932, began experimenting in the early 1920s with translucent sheets of alabaster that he would attach to wall-mounted metal chassis in formations. They made lights such as Mask (1923) and 1924’s Mouche (fly – on a wall, boom-tish!) and so forth, seemingly ad infinitum.