(b Paris, 24 March 1886; d Paris, 8 Feb 1945). French architect, designer and writer. His father, Maurice Mallet, was an important paintings dealer and appraiser, and one of the first to promote the work of Impressionist painters. While studying at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris (1903–6), Robert Mallet-Stevens frequently visited his family in Brussels, where he observed the construction of the Palais Stoclet (1905–11), designed by Josef Hoffmann for Mallet-Stevens’s uncle, Baron Stoclet. Hoffmann’s influence can be seen in Mallet-Stevens’s earliest designs for villas such as the Ecorcheville house (1914; 2nd version, Paris, Mus. A. Déc.). The graphic style of the villa design, the smooth white façades and rigorous geometry of the masses were derived from the Palais Stoclet. Mallet-Stevens’s series of drawings for city buildings (1917) were similar in style and were published as Une Cité moderne (1922). His villa at Hyères (1923–6; see FRANCE, fig. 14) for Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, revealed a style that had been influenced by contact with the De Stijl group. Simple prisms project laterally, in a series of terraces, from a central staircase that acts as the vertical counter-weight to the composition. Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Jozseph Czaky and Constantin Brancusi were chosen by Mallet-Stevens to provide the bas-reliefs and other sculptures for the villa. In 1928 the villa was used as the film set for Les Mystères du château du dé by Man Ray.