Pierre Jeanneret's Chandigarh Chairs and the Fakes Problem

Two chairs were due to go under the hammer in Paris on June 25, 2026. They carried inventory markings, PU/Chem/55 and PGI/W/CH-0202, that tie them to Panjab University and to PGIMER, the city's postgraduate medical institute. Two days earlier, Chandigarh registered two criminal cases over them, and after New Delhi intervened through diplomatic channels the sale was put on hold.

Furniture for a New Capital

The chairs were designed as office equipment. After independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Le Corbusier to plan a new city, and Le Corbusier turned to his cousin and longtime partner Pierre Jeanneret to furnish it. Jeanneret, born in Geneva on March 22, 1896, had run a practice with Le Corbusier since 1922, and from 1927 to 1937 Charlotte Perriand worked alongside them at the studio on rue de Sèvres in Paris. The partnership broke during the war, when Jeanneret joined the French Resistance and Le Corbusier worked with the Vichy government. Chandigarh brought them back together.

The government complex went up between 1951 and 1965. Jeanneret spent more than a decade on site as the city's chief architect, advising the local government and designing buildings of his own, including Gandhi Bhawan and the library at Panjab University. He also produced a huge range of designs for chairs, tables, cabinets and lamps, for every grade of employee from judges to janitors. The signature detail is the compass leg, a pair of angled supports that splay like a drafting compass. Frames were mostly solid teak or rosewood, and seats were often woven cane.

Credit is messier than the auction catalogs suggest. The designer Eulie Chowdhury and other Indian designers worked on the furniture, authorship was not documented, and Maristella Casciato, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, has said Chowdhury managed production. The pieces were made by small carpentry workshops across Punjab, using cheap local materials, with no known pattern book. Popular models stayed in production for decades, which is part of why nobody can say with confidence how many pieces exist. Jeanneret died on December 4, 1967, and his ashes were scattered on Sukhna Lake. His house, No. 57 in Sector 5, opened as a museum on what would have been his 121st birthday in 2017.

From Scrap Pile to Saleroom

For decades the furniture did its job and was replaced when it broke. In the late 1990s French dealers found discarded pieces piled in Chandigarh's streets and buildings and persuaded officials to auction them off. They bought from scrap dealers, junkyards and government sales at low prices. India's export rules defined antiques as objects over 100 years old, and this furniture was not even 50, so nothing stopped it from leaving.

The market built fast. By the mid-2000s the big New York auction houses were offering Chandigarh lots, and Christie's even sold a cast-iron Chandigarh manhole cover designed by Le Corbusier. The Paris dealers most associated with the material include François Laffanour of Galerie Downtown, Patrick Seguin, Philippe Jousse and Eric Touchaleaume of Galerie 54, and a 2010 book on the furniture helped make it a category. In 2013 the artist Amie Siegel traced the trade in her film Provenance, which Christie's then auctioned in London. It is the mid-century modern equivalent of the sneaker resale economy, a utilitarian object turned into a collectible by scarcity and a story.

The Fakes Problem

This is where buying gets dangerous. No foundation polices production or verifies provenance, Jeanneret never filed patents, and no exclusive license exists. The Wall Street Journal's 2019 investigation, by Sarah Medford, laid out the problem in detail. Listings labeled Jeanneret ranged from real pieces to honest reproductions to outright knockoffs, and online they are hard to tell apart.

The paper's sources described several tricks. Some makers leave new chairs outdoors for a year to age them. The designer Billy Cotton bought a desk that turned out to be fake, and the giveaways were joints that were too precise for handwork, wood on the underside that was too uniform and a finish that looked too new under its fake patina. Christie's specialist Michael Jefferson described what he called gene-splicing, building a whole chair around a single original arm. Laffanour said that some restored pieces had been heavily reconstructed. Even the source is not clean. The paper reported that inmates at Chandigarh's central jail had at one point been making new batches of chairs.

Authentic pieces often carry crudely painted or stenciled codes, like HCS/CT.18, for High Court Secretariat, coffee table number 18. The same advice applies here as with an Eames Lounge Chair or anything else in our design coverage. Buy from a dealer who will put the provenance in writing, and assume that a cheap one is not what it says.

Cassina launched an Hommage à Pierre Jeanneret collection developed with his heirs. Phantom Hands, a Bangalore workshop, makes its own re-editions in teak and cane. Neither pretends to be vintage.

India Pushes Back

Back in Chandigarh, the outflow became a scandal. In 2011 India's Ministry of Home Affairs issued a letter meant to stop sales and exports of the furniture, and the Capitol Complex became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2016. The legal position stayed weak. In a December 2021 reply reported by the Tribune, the Archaeological Survey of India said the furniture did not count as an antiquity or art treasure under the 1972 Antiquities and Art Treasures Act and that it might not be able to act against foreign sales. Reports since 2015 describe thefts from Panjab University and the Government College of Art and Craft, and organized gangs swapping originals for replicas before smuggling them out.

The Tribune reported that the June 2026 cases were the first criminal action of their kind, after more than 100 international auctions of Chandigarh furniture since 2009. A week earlier, seven pieces had sold in Brussels for about Rs 1.6 crore. The administration also asked the Ministry of External Affairs to work with French authorities to stop the sale and help repatriate the chairs if they had been removed unlawfully.

For anyone who loves this furniture, the uncomfortable fact is that the stenciled code that proves a chair is real also proves whose it was. Donald Judd, who counted Le Corbusier as an influence, is in our Marfa furniture story, and Chandigarh's concrete belongs in any history of postwar architecture.

PU/Chem/55 reads like an inventory number from a chemistry department at Panjab University. Somebody in Chandigarh is now asking for it back.