The Demolition of Dennery

The demolition of the Dennery factory on the edge of Preuilly is nearly at an end. It started in June and have caused quite a lot of nostalgia in town.

Many of the last cohort of workers are still alive, having worked in many cases their entire careers at Dennery, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Dennery workshops, in November 2019.

The town was proud of this enterprise which was making high quality furniture that in its day was known worldwide.

In the 1960s the firm employed between 150 and 200 people (which in a town with a population of around a thousand, is significant). It finally closed for good in 2002, but in 1983 had won an award for exporters with fewer than 200 employees.

Former factory manager's house, November 2019.

The clients were corporations like L'Oréal, Mercedes-Benz, Balmain, Renault, who would come to Preuilly and Dennery for their headquarters interiors and furniture. 

The factory worked in luxury woods like mahogany, ebony, rosewood, lemonwood, and birdseye maple. The furniture produced here was going just about everywhere in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Former Dennery employees can remember the Saudi King visiting to personally choose elements of the pieces for his private apartment. 

The demolished workshops, November 2023.

 

Then there was the interior fittings for the Louvre Pyramid, the Bastille Opera and the National Library of France. One prestigious contract after another. But there were also periods when the order books were empty and the workers were put on chomage partiel, an arrangement where the State will cover 80% of employees wages via a specific type of unemployment benefit (widely used by many firms during Covid lockdowns).

And in 1998 the business was bought by a Paris based enterprise. Employees found out via the furniture trade press rather than were informed directly. It was a shock.

The former factory manager's house, November 2023, the only structure on the site which will not be demolished.

Former employees claim the new owners set unrealistic goals and were not overly scrupulous, so they set up a workers co-operative and took over the business. In the end though, the project failed through lack of support amongst the workers, and the real estate (buildings and land) is now owned by a medical supplies distributor.

Once the site is cleared TotalQuadran will start installing thousands of solar panels. Former Dennery employees are bitter that the Comcom (a level of local government above 'commune' and below 'département') could not create an 'atelier relais', a facility designed to take young people who want to train in a trade, but have been unable to gain a place at a specialist artisan college or an apprenticeship.