When Design Stars (and Brothers) Collide

Since the turn of the millennium, when the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec emerged as international product design prodigies while still in their 20s — hailed as the most famous French design stars since Philippe Starck — they have taken equal credit for almost everything they have brought into the world.

A modular office desk with the propped-elbow informality of a French farmhouse table. A bright green room divider that spreads chaotically like algae. A fat, curvy sofa that resembles a piece of overripe fruit. Elemental furnishings for the Bourse de Commerce, an 18th-century commodities exchange in Paris transformed into a contemporary art museum.

It was impossible to know where one sibling’s contributions ended and the other’s began.

Their work is enshrined in the permanent collections of the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Design Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art.

For a decade, however, the Bouroullecs have been quietly following forking paths. And now they have brought their partnership to an end. They recently moved out of their shared studio in the 10th Arrondissement in Paris and into individual spaces nearby, where they will turn out projects — often for the same clients — under their own names.