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When the furniture manufacturer Leleu-Deshays called on the Polish-born French sculptor Maurice Calka to design a desk in 1969, Calka deeply considered the assignment, asking himself, “What is a desk these days?” At the time, he concluded, it was too often covered with unsightly new gadgets and long, tangled cords. His solution? A fiberglass-and-polyester (a.k.a. plastic) design that would “hide all that” mess with a swooping shape and built-in electronic circuitry for telephone, intercom, and a television monitor. In the same way he might begin a sculpture, he realized the positive out of hand-hewn plaster.
“Some even had a cigar lighter,” reveals Serge, Calka’s son, who now handles his late father’s estate. “He loved sports cars, and you see a lot of that inspiration in this design.”
The first version of the desk, dubbed the Bureau PDG or CEO desk, also included an integrated swivel chair. But fewer than 10 of these were ever produced. (As Calka quipped, “Only a CEO could afford it.”) So he tweaked the design into the more streamlined iteration we now call the Boomerang, trading interior tech for a sleek, space-age silhouette that worked in a range of environments. Serge recalls spotting an orange one at a local driving school, when he was a child. Indeed, the desks were manufactured in a rainbow of colors, but Serge estimates only some 100 were ever made before production halted by the mid-1970s. In recent years Serge has been crafting a version of the desk in CNC-machine-carved, hand-finished wood.
Today, rare originals find their way into contemporary projects, from a historic house in Paris appointed by AD100 designer Hugo Toro to a 1930s Paul Williams Tudor in Bel Air, California, where they inject a jolt of futurism. “The desk is more than furniture; it’s a manifesto of form and imagination,” gushes Toro. “It embodies the spirit of French Space Age design—fluid, radical, and unapologetically modern.”
This story appears in AD’s December issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
