Design Moments: Miss Blanche chair, c. 1988

Lucky the person who this St Valentine’s Day gets a bunch of red roses trapped in acrylic – or more specifically this Miss Blanche chair designed in 1988 by minimalist Japanese genius Shiro Kuramata (1934-91).

Aside from being beautiful, originals of his delicate-looking chair are highly collectible – one from the 1980s sold in Sotheby’s for €300,000.

Minimalism with its exploration and use of basic materials, such as concrete, metals and glass used in domestic settings tends not to be associated with romance but there is something undeniably poetic about a chair whose only decoration is a cascading bunch of trapped red roses and is called after Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Angular shapes

There is no denying that Miss Blanche is a prime example of minimalism though, with its angular shapes on anodised aluminium legs.

And like all examples of the genre its apparent simplicity belies the great difficulty in its production.

Suspending the roses in the acrylic, which starts out as liquid and must be poured into a mould, presented several problems – not least that when Kuramata used his preferred fresh roses they shrivelled and turned black.

Creating sheets of acrylic that don’t have bubbles and are completely see-through is a further technical challenge. Such were the problems that his initial batch yielded just eight Miss Blanche chairs.