Jean-Michel Wilmotte was born in 1948. A graduate of the École Camondo and then of architecture, he founded his first design office — Wilmotte & Associés — in 1975, followed in 1976 by a design bureau, Wilmotte & Industries, with subsequent offices in Tokyo, Nîmes, Seoul, London. In 2005, he created the Wilmotte corporate foundation and the Venice Prize. In 2005, he also created the Wilmotte corporate foundation and the W Prize.
In 1982, French President François Mitterrand asked him to refurbish part of the private apartments at the Élysée Palace.
As of April 2021, Wilmotte & Associés operates mainly in five fields — architecture, interior architecture, museography, urbanism and design. The agency has 250 collaborators of 27 different nationalities and works in 23 countries. Jean-Michel Wilmotte holds "a particular affection for cultural and museographic spaces, as well as for renovation and reconversion projects" — like the conversion of the former royal hospital of Versailles into housing, cultural space and shops (2015), the Halle Freyssinet into Station F — the world's largest start-up campus (2017) — the Collège des Bernardins (2008), the Hôtel Lutetia (2018), or the Hôtel de l'Artillerie into the Sciences Po campus in Paris.
The Saint Antoine armchair, in black-lacquered peeled rattan and intended for indoor use, is the result of a 2019 collaboration with the Wilmotte & Associés office.