Coffee pot, from a coffee and tea set

Architect-designer Mallet-Stevens was extremely influential in the advancement of French modernity during the '20s and '30s. He designed many avant-garde film sets, several notable buildings with set pieces of furniture (most of them in tubular steel) and metalwork such as this coffee and tea service for La Maison Desny. When viewed from the side, the mechanistic-looking set suggests a crankshaft or turbines. Only two of these sets are known to exist, the other being in the State Museum of Decorative Arts in Munich.