Andrée Putman!

Meet Andrée Putman (Paris, 1925) the Grande dame of French design.

The first right answer came from the outstanding, poetic, unique blog Little Augury, where you can discover unusual people, facts, art, poems, romantic postcards and much more.
Congratulations to all the many people who had the right answer, and you can find all the comments at the bottom of the previous post (HERE), but next time I will find something more difficult! Thanks to all for participating in the game.

Putman, the tres elegant Parisienne and her trademark style are now the subject of a three-month retrospective opening this week at Paris city hall.
Almost everything is black and white in Putman’s world. Known as the queen of the checkerboard, she has put her monochrome signature on everything from the Morgans Hotel in New York, with which she invented the boutique hotel concept to a skyscraper in Hong Kong, a luxury apartment-hotel complex, named after her. She designed everything for The Putman, from its art deco-style façade to its floor plans and furnishings. “I was amazed because, step by step, they gave me freedom, which is very scarce,” Putman says. “They gave me confidence, which is something else that’s scarce. And when they said, ‘Would you like it to bear your name?’ I said, ‘Let’s say yes.’ It’s a very delicate thing to do. I took it as an honour. I like daring ideas and that was one of them.”

The Morgans Hotel in New York

"She had no training, she just opened her eyes and looked around," said her daughter Olivia, who now runs the Putman design studio, "When she went over to a friend's for dinner, she would offer to haul around the sofas, or drape a dishcloth over a lamp to soften the mood".

Olivia and Andrée Putman (Cotemaison.fr)

Putman truly came into her own after divorcing her husband, opening her own design firm, Écart, when she was 53 years old and soon great projects followed: stores for Guerlain and Yves Saint Laurent, movie sets for Greenway, revamping the interior of the Concorde airplane and much more.