Menu
Quick test for your next family dinner: ask everyone at the table to name a famous furniture designer. Chances are the room goes quiet, or somebody mumbles Eames. Hardly anyone will come up with a name from Tokyo, Seoul or Mumbai. Funny, because some of the most copied chairs and lamps on the planet were created by designers with roots in Asia.
Walk into the showroom of a big Italian design house today, say Edra, and you will find pieces signed by Asian designers. The thing is, the most famous international companies have been working with talent from Japan for decades. Some of those designers are stars in the design world and barely known outside it, while others made things so familiar that the copies traveled farther than their names. Time to give credit where it’s due.
- Isamu Noguchi
If you grew up hanging paper lanterns for Diwali, Noguchi’s Akari lamps will look like old friends. He started making them from paper and bamboo in 1951, and they are still handmade in Gifu, Japan, by the family-run workshop Ozeki & Co. The round paper pendant in half the apartments on Instagram? You can thank him. He also designed a glass coffee table for Herman Miller in 1947, and it has been copied so often it barely needs an introduction.
- Sori Yanagi
His Butterfly Stool, made in Japan by Tendo Mokko since 1956, is two identical pieces of curved plywood held together by a metal rod. That’s it. Look at it from the front and you’ll see why it got the name. Yanagi also designed the Olympic torch for the 1964 Tokyo Games, which is not a bad side project.
- George Nakashima
Born in Washington State in 1905, Nakashima learned traditional Japanese woodworking from an older carpenter while his family was held in an internment camp during World War II. Later he opened a workshop in Pennsylvania and became famous for tables that keep the wild, uneven edge of the tree. Every “live edge” dining table you’ve seen in a trendy restaurant is basically a tribute to him, and the workshop he founded, Nakashima Woodworkers, is still run by his family.
- Shiro Kuramata
Kuramata had a thing for making furniture look like it might vanish. His Miss Blanche chair from 1988, produced in a limited edition of 56 by the Tokyo company Ishimaru, is made of clear acrylic with red roses floating inside, like flowers frozen in ice. The name comes from Blanche DuBois, the fragile heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire. Originals now sell at auction for six figures, so maybe don’t sit on one.
- Toshiyuki Kita
Picture a lounge chair with two floppy ears on top, like a cartoon rabbit. That’s the Wink, designed by Kita for Cassina in 1980. Each ear tilts on its own, the footrest slides out and the covers zip off in bright colors. It ended up in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York, a pretty serious honor for a chair that looks this cheerful.
- Masanori Umeda
Umeda clearly had fun. In the early 1980s he designed a bed shaped like a boxing ring for Memphis, the wild Milan design collective. In 1990 he went in a softer direction with the Rose Chair for Edra, a round armchair made of red velvet petals that looks exactly like a giant rose you can sit in. It is still one of the most recognizable armchairs of that decade.
- Tokujin Yoshioka
The Honey-Pop chair arrives flat, as a stack of about 120 sheets of thin paper. You open it like those honeycomb paper decorations at birthday parties, and it becomes a chair. The first person who sits down gives it its final shape, so every single one is different. Years later, he went the opposite way with Invisibles, a see-through furniture collection for Kartell that almost disappears in a room.
- Nipa Doshi
Born in Mumbai in 1971, Doshi runs a London studio with her partner, Jonathan Levien. Their sofa for Moroso with the unforgettable name, My Beautiful Backside, swaps the usual backrest for a row of round cushions in different sizes and fabrics. Anyone who grew up with a pile of bolsters on the family diwan will get it immediately.
- Naoto Fukasawa
You may know his work without knowing it. Fukasawa designed the wall-mounted CD player for MUJI, the one you switch on by pulling a cord, like an old ceiling fan. His Hiroshima chair, made in solid wood by the Japanese company Maruni since 2008, follows the same idea: no drama, and it just feels right the moment you sit down.
- Oki Sato
Toronto-born Sato runs Nendo, a Tokyo studio that turns out an almost unbelievable number of projects every year. The Cabbage Chair is a favorite. Created in 2008 for an exhibition curated by Issey Miyake, it starts as a roll of the pleated paper left over from the fashion house’s production. You peel the layers back one by one, like cabbage leaves, until a seat appears. No frame, no nails, no screws.
Seoul, Delhi, Shanghai: Who’s Next?
What these designers share is a way of thinking that comes from Asian craft and daily life: respect for simple materials, a light touch, and objects that feel good before they try to look impressive. That mindset has become part of what the whole world now calls good design. A lot of the furniture sold in Europe and America today, from simple wooden chairs to paper pendant lamps, carries some of that influence, even when the label says Milan or Copenhagen.
More names are on the way. Designers from Delhi or Shanghai now show up regularly at the big international design fairs, among them Korean designer Kwangho Lee, who became known for knotting ordinary electrical cables by hand into chairs and lamps. And for anyone who grew up surrounded by these traditions, it might be a good reason to look twice at the furniture in your grandmother’s house.
