Paulin, Paulin, Paulin Revolutionized Furniture. Speakers, Music & Museums Are Next
In the middle of Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2026 show, there was a house. Inside, a wooden bedframe was so low it was nearly level with the floor, the bathroom bent to the will of a luxurious stone bath, and one of Pierre Paulin’s angular Tapis-Siège seats in the center of a listening room lined with records and speakers. This was the same kind of floor-level seating system enjoyed by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.
Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams and Flea both consider the Tapis-Siège the ideal sofa for lounging and listening to music. But what if the Tapis-Siège was capable of also playing said music? This is the future of Paulin Paulin Paulin. For so long his legacy was static, established by re-editions of his existing innovations. But future looks — and sounds — fresh from atop Pierre Paulin's updated furniture, with everything from record labels to even a museum in sight.
Benjamin Paulin is the son of Pierre Paulin and co-founder of Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, a family-owned company keeping Pierre’s legacy alive by making his most ambitious unrealized concepts a reality. Over a phone call, he tells me that he’s been producing this new kind of Tapis-Siège on the sly. Called “Vidéo Barnum,” it’s Benjamin Paulin toying with Pierre’s original designs like never before.
“We are trying to create new functions,” Benjamin Paulin says. “But it's very important for us to stay with the functional idea that was the essence of my father's work.”
A Vidéo Barnum and a Tapis-Siège look almost identical. Both are large square beds of cushions whose corners fold up to create triangle-shaped seats that surround the center. The difference is that the Vidéo Barnum is secretly also a sound system. “We were able to, without changing the design, put sound inside the piece,” explains Paulin. “We basically transformed the back seat into a speaker.”
Pierre Paulin was one of France’s most inventive post-war designers, creating progressive experiments like the rippled “Tongue Chair” and curvaceous “Ribbon Chair,” both part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, but his most ingenious designs were too far ahead of their time.
The “Dune Sofa,” a modular system of curvaceous cushions that together form a sprawling network of peaks and troughs, is today Pierre Paulin's most recognizable work partly because it’s been seen in the houses of Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, and Kim Kardashian, among others. Justin Bieber is such a fan of the Dune sofa he has at home that he commissioned a custom one for his backstage area at Coachella (or Bieberchella, as it's been nicknamed). But the Dune initially never went beyond the prototyping stage because its complexity intimidated producers. Paulin’s snaking “La Déclive” seating system, designed for a future when floors transform into furniture, was also impossible to mass-produce. Benjamin Paulin calls these unaccomplished concepts “industrial utopias,” and dedicates his time to bringing them to life.
The Tapis-Siège is another industrial utopia, though not due to Pierre Paulin’s lack of trying. His vision of a transformable square seating area was pitched for a late ‘60s Herman Miller project exploring modular design but didn’t progress past ideation. It nearly became reality in 1985 through the original Vidéo Barnum, an idea for an experiential listening room where large Tapis-Siège sofas would fill an entire room in Paris’ Grand Palais, but that was also scrapped. Pierre eventually conceded by creating his own Tapis-Siège at home.
Paulin, Paulin, Paulin’s team pored over Pierre’s original blueprints to make the Tapis-Siège a reality after his passing in 2008 but when looking at the plans for Vidéo Barnum they realized that it’d be possible to go beyond.
Def-Jam co-founder and musical guru Rick Rubin put the first prototype to use as part of a sound installation at 2024’s Festival of the Sun, his Tuscan micro-festival of music and culture, where it was “more of a system that was capturing the sound and transforming it into vibrations,” says Paulin. Since then, by working with a sound engineer in Paris on the technical specs, he claims to have “really focused on the sound.” A more advanced Vidéo Barnum quietly debuted at Nike’s 2024 Olympic Games pop-up before appearing in a listening event in the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, Funkhaus’ Saal 1, in Berlin.
The Vidéo Barnum is still evolving, but “I’ve produced a few of them for some of our friends and clients,” says Paulin. “It's something we are continuing to develop, to improve, and that we are very happy to produce for collectors.”
Paulin, Paulin, Paulin has never before departed so substantially from Pierre Paulin’s plans but the company — founded in 2008 by Benjamin, his wife Alice Lemoine, and Pierre Paulin’s wife and business partner, Maïa Wodzislawska-Paulin — is becoming much more than only an outlet for Pierre’s unproduced ideas.
“In recent years, we have been very lucky to exist in the mind of the youth, of the designers, of the collectors,” says Paulin, and this newfound popularity has spurred Paulin, Paulin, Paulin’s most transformative era.
That means looking back even as it looks forward. The company has established an independent endowment fund, Fonds Pierre Paulin, that intends to house the world’s biggest Pierre Paulin collection in a 600-square-meter museum being constructed in the south of France and spearheaded by Elsa Janssen, the former Yves Saint Laurent Museum director. “This is our legacy project,” says Paulin. “It's important for us, as Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, not to invisibilize Pierre Paulin. We want the endowment fund to be stronger than we are, in the sense that it will be the authority on Pierre Paulin.”
Coming soon, there’s Sounds Like Paulin, a record label launched in 2026. Its first release doesn’t quite have the bombast you’d expect of a label that hobknobs with Pharrell and Rick Rubin: French composer Marc Chouarain created a recording made using one of only a handful Cristal Baschets ever made, an extremely rare organ-like instrument played using wet fingertips to create a sound Paulin describes as what you’d imagine “the universe to sound like.”
Also in Sounds Like Paulin's pipeline is a collaborative project from The National guitarist Bryce Dessner and composer Steve Reich with French string quartet Quatuor Zaïde, then a compilation album of friends who have passed through Benjamin Paulin’s home studio. He’s tight-lipped about which guests those might be but Travis Scott once recorded there and FKA Twigs was seen stopping by in 2025.
It’ll eventually be possible to blast Sounds Like Paulin music from a Paulin, Paulin, Paulin sound system as the listener reclines atop it all, demonstrative of Paulin’s far-reaching plans for his family company. “Sounds like Paulin is a continuation of the work Paulin, Paulin, Paulin is doing, and also a way for us to open up,” he says. “Design is not art, but it’s a tool to bring people together and to inspire and to create a safe space. We don’t wanna only produce furniture.”
