Percival Lafer

Percival Lafer is a Brazilian architect and furniture designer, and one of the pioneers of Brazilian modernism — though for decades he remained, in collectors' circles, its best-kept secret. Born in São Paulo in 1936, he trained as an architect at Mackenzie Presbyterian University, intending to practise. His father's death shortly after graduation redirected him: Lafer and his brothers inherited the family furniture company, Móveis Lafer, founded in 1927, and Percival took on its design direction.

In 1961 he launched the MP-1 armchair — a low, T-shaped steel frame clad in thin strips of solid rosewood, with a foam-upholstered seat rather than the sprung construction standard at the time. It was an immediate commercial success and set the template for everything that followed: engineered steel or hardwood substructures, generous leather upholstery, and — Lafer's particular signature — moving parts. He has spoken of being drawn specifically to "the motion features of furniture," and reclining mechanisms and articulated frames recur throughout his catalogue in a way that sets his work apart from most of his Brazilian modernist contemporaries.

Where designers like Zalszupin and Rodrigues worked in smaller ateliers, Lafer built a genuine manufacturing operation — the company traded as Lafer MP, the initials standing for Móveis Patenteados, "patented furniture," a nod to how many of his mechanisms were formally protected. Pieces were exported to the US, Western Europe and Scandinavia through the 1960s and 70s, under a stated aim of "bringing good design to everyone, not just the intellectual elite".

Lafer is still living, and a retrospective of his work was staged as part of São Paulo Design Weekend in 2017.