Contemporary designer Gabriel Charbit’s creative journey was shaped by his diverse educational background. Trained as both an engineer—at the Institut Supérieur d’Electronique de Paris, obtained an engineering degree and a master’s in computer science—and a cabinetmaker before earning a Master’s degree in industrial design, Charbit approaches furniture as a medium for exploration between disciplines. Each work in Charbit’s oeuvre extends his ongoing reflection on transformation and interpretation. Reflecting on the path of his artistic journey, Charbit recalls designing his first furniture piece during an exchange program in Buenos Aires in his final year of engineering school. The sculptural chair was a pivotal moment for Charbit, prompting him to explore variations inspired by diverse architectural styles and design lineages. In 2017, he enrolled at the École Boulle, with a focus on cabinet-making. After years of development, Charbit created the first physical prototype of his original chair design.
In 2018, an apprenticeship with French artist Jacques Jarriges significantly informed Charbit’s artistic trajectory. Under Jarriges, Charbit began to develop a signature vocabulary rooted in the investigation of negative space. It is within these voids that a durable artistic concept began to fully manifest.
In 2018 Charbit pursued courses at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, earning a master’s degree in design specialized in contemporary technology. He gained experience in various fields by working for an architecture firm, a molding workshop, and finally a furniture edition company. It was during this period that his aspiration to become a full-time furniture designer began to crystallize.
His first body of work began with the skyline. Charbit imagined architecture becoming furniture, translating the city’s silhouette into a series of vertical compositions that formed his Skyline collection. As his practice has evolved, his work has progressively zoomed in from the image of the city to the language of its architecture. What interested him was no longer the skyline itself, but its rhythm, the repetition of windows, the cadence of structures, the balance between constraint and variation, and the invisible dialogue that give a city its harmony. Moving to New York marked a shift. Surrounded by steel, glass and mirror, Charbit has gradually embraced these materials, drawn to the way they interact with light and their surroundings. Like opening a curtain, his work invites the outside in. By isolating fragments of architecture from their original context, Charbit reimagines them as furniture, allowing familiar elements to be seen in unexpected ways.
This idea became central to his 2022 collection Metropolis. Inspired by New York City’s iconic skyscrapers and their abstract architecture, Charbit does not seek to impose a single reading. Instead, his work invites the viewer to look beyond the object itself. Every encounter is different, leaving space for imagination, personal interpretation and appropriation. Through Charbit’s lens the skyline of NYC is a magnificent product of the sum of its parts, with each building’s unique function becoming obsolete when viewed as the greater whole. Similarly Charbit’s aim for his designs is to transcend their traditional roles, inspiring a play between material textures and outside parameters such as light, space, and distance, ultimately leaving room for personal interpretation. Each piece in the collection, which includes desks, chairs, consoles, lighting, and room dividers, becomes an architectural marvel in itself.
Charbit’s work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Surface Magazine, Business of Home, Town & Country, Tendances Magazine, and Interior Design Magazine.
