Drawings and photographic material, Rose, sofa 玫瑰（沙發）繪圖及影像資料

This chair’s voluptuous appearance results from its layered ‘petals’ of well-padded upholstery, each stitched by hand and arranged to imitate the form of a rose. Covered in red velvet to match the flower’s connotations of romance, the result is an expressive functional sculpture characteristic of designer Umeda Masanori’s work in the late 1980s and 1990s. One of Umeda’s working drawings for the chair shows that he originally planned for it to have five concentric layers of petal shapes spiralling towards its centre. The production version of the chair has three layers in a somewhat simpler arrangement.



Umeda founded his Tokyo design studio in 1980, returning to Japan after working for over a decade with Ettore Sottsass at Olivetti in Italy. Focusing on both product design and commercial interiors, he has continued to explore colourful, sculptural forms that can be broadly characterised as postmodernist. Umeda was a participant in the radical Memphis design collective in the early 1980s, and his later work carries with it some of the same expressive spirit, humour, and interest in the symbolic associations of objects.