Pierre Barbe

Pierre Barbe (28 March 1900 – 26 April 2004) was a French architect.

Barbe became the "house architect" for the Schlumberger family. He designed Pierre Schlumberger's house on Lazy Lane in Houston, Texas. For Pierre and his first wife Claire he restored a holiday house on the Normandy coast, and designed a new house at Tourettes-sur-Loup on the Riviera.

For Pierre and his second wife São, he renovated their apartment in Sutton Place, New York, and an 18th-century hôtel particulier in the Rue Férou, Paris.

In 1930, he and Louise Venard—his partner from 1925 until her death in 1955—founded a tapestry and trimmings workshop called “Installation Meubles Tissus” (IMT), which began by producing Pierre Barbe's furniture.

During the 1930s, Pierre Barbe began to distance himself, without abandoning it entirely, from the Functionalism (architecture) and international style that permeated the UAM (which he left in 1934), returning to a certain bourgeois classicism, particularly in northern France and Belgium.

From 1947, he participated in the redevelopment of the Villa Cavrois.

The creation of large estates was a culmination of Barbe's work. At the Domaine des Treilles (from 1961 to 1982, in the municipalities of Tourtour and Flayosc, Var), he restored and built a group of functional houses in the Provençal style.

Rejecting dogmatism, Pierre Barbe devoted himself to synthesizing classicism and modernity.

Pierre Barbe continued his work until the age of 94, before passing away at the age of 104. The press paid tribute to him on this occasion.