Which came first, the chicken or the exquisitely finished eggshell cabinet?

While you were clucking over the price of eggs, Mark de la Vega was devouring them by the dozen — 300 dozen in the past six months. But not as omelettes. De la Vega, a designer in Brooklyn, NYC, produces panels and furnishings ornamented with eggshell lacquer.

- YELENA MOROZ ALPERT

The finish originated with East Asian artisans, who embedded shell fragments from duck or chicken eggs into the surfaces of decorative art pieces as a substitute for white pigment. In the early 20th century, Swiss-born art deco craftsman Jean Dunand bartered his metalworking skills to learn the technique, also known as coquille d’oeuf, from a Japanese expert visiting Paris. According to art historian Félix Marcilhac, Dunand was the first to use tweezers to apply crushed shells to produce a “white craquelure effect”.

“When you see it in person, it is just candy,” said John Gachot, an interior designer who worked on the former West Village home of fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Gachot was referring to Jacobs’ circa-1925 Dunand side table, which sold at Sotheby's in 2019 for US$131,250.

Almost exactly a century after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the show that gave Art Deco its name, opened in Paris, Dunand’s legacy continues. In January, the British company de Gournay unveiled Dunand, a gilded silk wallpaper whose angular, speckled pattern and brassy sheen allude to his metalwork and his eggshells.

With glitzy, geometry-loving Deco reemerging in contemporary home furnishings, the technique is proliferating.

De la Vega’s eggshell millwork can be found in a New York City pied-à-terre and an entryway closet in an Aspen, Colorado, condo — both projects of Kaitlyn Payne, the principal of Basicspace, an interior design studio, in Portland, Maine.