Designer whose flexible furniture for informal 60s living gave a futuristic look to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Olivier Mourgue always wanted to design the future. Growing up in Paris in the 1950s, he took against the ornate antique furniture of his parents’ apartment, the formality of a dining room with a table surrounded by elaborately uncomfortable chairs and a living room dominated by a sofa used only on special occasions. “Furniture like that has nothing to do with life,” he would suggest later. “One is never at ease in such rooms.”

Mourgue, who has died aged 87, set out to design furniture that belonged to the modern world, and blurred the boundaries between furniture and architecture. In his view, that meant that it should be flexible, informal, affordable and as close to the floor as possible. He succeeded in a way that he could not have expected.