Benjamin Paulin, the son of the late French furniture designer Pierre Paulin, spends a lot of time on Instagram looking for knockoffs of his father’s work.
The Dune sofa, which Pierre Paulin conceived of in the 70s and which his namesake design firm manufactures by special order today, is often tweaked and replicated by interior designers. Resembling an above-ground conversation pit, a Dune-like sofa looks especially good in the sprawling, midcentury-modern homes that are strewn around Hollywood. Paulin often spots them in magazine spreads and on design-centric social-media accounts.
Just last week, Paulin found another faux one on the feed of a celebrated Los Angeles–based interior designer. When he approached her about it, he says, “she pretended not to know.”
For most people, furniture is something to put in the living room. For others, it is artwork, intellectual property that should be legally protected. And that’s where things get complicated.
Last month, the Donald Judd Foundation, a nonprofit organization that represents the designer’s legacy, sued Kim Kardashian along with Clements Design, who created the interiors for Kardashian’s Skkn by Kim headquarters, for trademark and copyright infringement. In a 2022 YouTube video that received millions of views, Kardashian gave a tour of the space, name-checking the artists and designers whose work was present there.
“If you guys are furniture people—because I’ve really gotten into furniture lately—these Donald Judd tables are really amazing, and totally blend in with the seats, and they’re so easy,” she said, gesturing to pieces that closely resembled Judd’s La Mansana Table 22 and Chair 84. “We have so many people coming and eating all the time.”
But Kardashian’s dining set was a replica. According to The New York Times, only three authentic Judd tables (which cost $90,000) have been sold in the past 15 years; and the matching chairs, which are sold for $9,000 each, are stamped and numbered. Clements Design, the highly regarded mother-and-son firm owned by Kathleen and Tommy Clements and which appears on Architectural Digest’s coveted AD100 list, submitted the invoice to lawyers, which stated in black and white that the table was “in the style of Donald Judd,” which is auction-world-speak for “reproduction.”
There’s nothing illegal about using artwork as inspiration, provided that one is not directly replicating copyrighted material. Most of these bespoke quasi-creations are done aboveboard, sometimes mimicking historic works of yesteryear that have entered the public domain. Amazon and Alibaba are full of budget-priced versions of Eames chairs, Castiglioni floor lamps, and Ubald Klug Terrazza sofas. Even when this material is copyrighted, waging a legal battle is complicated, expensive, and rarely worth the investment on the part of the artists’ or designers’ foundations, descendants, and licensees.
For most people, furniture is something to put in the living room. For others, it is artwork, intellectual property that should be legally protected.
According to an interior designer who declined to be named, the Judd replicas are rumored to have been made by Waldo’s Designs, the furniture studio owned by Waldo Fernandez, the partner of Tommy Clements. (Air Mail did not receive responses to its requests for comment from Waldo’s Designs and Clements Design.) While he primarily makes pieces only for interior designers, some Waldo Designs items have made their way to the auction houses; a desk that he made for Courteney Cox’s house is currently selling for $2,240 at Sotheby’s.
Clements Design claimed that its furniture “differed materially” from Judd’s original pieces; they used a different type of wood, and changed the proportions. This may have been in bad taste, but the Judd Foundation will likely have to prove that the existence of the knockoff, coupled with Kardashian’s claim, undermined the integrity of Judd’s work and misled consumers.
The question at the center of the suit: What did Kardashian know, and when did she know it? Did she order a Judd table and fail to read the fine print? Did she knowingly purchase a fake and think no one would notice? Did she just … forget?
“I think it’s unfortunate,” says Paulin about the episode, “because I personally don’t think Kim knew [that the table and chairs were a copy].” In the same YouTube video, she also name-checked Rick Owens, whose authentic pieces were used in her office design.
“The problem is, sometimes, interior designers and architects. I don’t want to say they’re bad people…. There are clients who really want the piece, and [the designers] know it’s impossible,” he says. Many well-known furnishings, such as Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair, were manufactured in very limited quantities, but today official pieces are made by the Italian brand Cassina (which also creates properly authorized works by the likes of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and others, sometimes even updating designs with the full cooperation of the various stakeholders).
However, if a client insists on having a version of the Red and Blue Chair—which any number of independent furniture-makers could replicate fairly easily—that is bright fuchsia and would go just perfectly next to the Anish Kapoor in the sitting room of their Park Avenue apartment, there’s only one way to make that happen. That’s when “fabrication” comes in.
Paulin has much more legal recourse in France than he does in the United States. “Honestly, it’s like the Far West [in the U.S.],” he says. “In France, you have no situation like that. When someone makes something that approaches what we are doing, we can sue him immediately and send the police…. Maybe [Clements Design] didn’t realize when they did this how wrong it is for our kind of business,” he says. “They are killing us.”
But for some designers working in the field, this Judd fiasco signals a larger issue. “I think it’s just lazy,” says a successful Los Angeles–based designer, rattling off a litany of his well-known colleagues suspected of trafficking in fakes in one way or another.
Meanwhile, Paulin continues his crusade against the owners of the replica Dunes on Instagram, hoping that public shaming will at least prevent designers and homeowners from trading on his father’s legacy. But, he claims, he’s a happy warrior. “In a way, it’s sort of a good sign,” he says. “It means everybody wants it.”
Dan Rubinstein is a design journalist and the host of the Grand Tourist podcast
