The Ghost Chair: A Real Armchair Made From One Sheet of Glass

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Most "impossible-looking" furniture is a photo trick or a one-off prototype. The Ghost chair is neither: it's a genuine, sittable armchair, cut and curved from a single sheet of glass, that's been in continuous commercial production since 1987 — and, like Micuna's OVO high chair, a piece that's earned real museum attention in a furniture category that rarely gets any.

Designed by someone who doubted it could work

Ghost was designed by Cini Boeri, a significant figure in Italian architecture and design, working with Tomu Katayanagi, for the Italian manufacturer FIAM Italia. Boeri has been open about the fact that she doubted her own proposal could actually be manufactured when she first sketched it — a chair with no frame, no joints, and no material other than glass itself providing the structure. It was FIAM's technical expertise that turned what looked like an impractical idea into a real, sellable object.

Boeri (1924–2020, born Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno in Milan) was a genuinely significant figure in 20th-century Italian design, not a one-hit novelty act — she graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1951, interned under Gio Ponti, then worked with Marco Zanuso before opening her own studio in 1963. Her furniture for the Italian manufacturer Arflex included the Serpentone continuous sofa (1971) and the Strips Series (1972), which won her a first Compasso d'Oro in 1979 — decades before Ghost earned its own. She was also one of the few women to receive major recognition in a field dominated by men at the time, alongside contemporaries like Gae Aulenti, and was awarded a Compasso d'Oro for lifetime achievement in 2011. Ghost's 2022 award came two years after she died, a genuinely rare case of a design still actively winning honours for its creator posthumously.

The company that made it possible

FIAM Italia was founded in 1973 by Vittorio Livi in Tavullia, in Italy's Marche region, formed by merging several smaller glassmaking businesses Livi already owned. It became the first company in the world to dedicate an entire furniture collection specifically to curved glass — heating and shaping a single sheet so that what would normally be a chair's separate top, sides and legs become one continuous, monolithic surface instead. Ghost is the clearest possible demonstration of that entire approach: not glass used as a decorative panel on a conventional frame, but glass as the frame.

How a sheet of glass holds a person

The chair is formed from a single sheet of 12-millimetre curved glass, cut using a technique called Paser, developed by FIAM itself in the 1980s specifically to make this kind of cutting and curving possible at a commercial scale. Despite the material and its modest 12mm thickness, a genuine production Ghost chair is rated to hold up to 150 kilograms — a real, tested engineering figure, not a marketing claim. The name itself is deliberate: "Ghost" as in shadow, trace, spirit — a chair designed to feel like it's barely there in a room, which a transparent, frameless glass form genuinely achieves in a way no upholstered piece can.

Real recognition, not just a design-blog favourite

Ghost debuted at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1987 and won a reader's-choice innovation prize from the magazine Interni almost immediately. It's held in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York, and has also been shown at the Triennale di Milano and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York state — genuine museum placements, not just retailer marketing copy. In 2022, 35 years after its debut, it won the Compasso d'Oro — Italy's oldest and most prestigious design award — in a category specifically created to honour long-running "product careers" rather than new releases, a real acknowledgement that the design has stayed relevant rather than dated. Real design pieces attract real collectors, too — see our piece on Flou's GrandPiano bed, once owned by Jim Carrey and sold at a documented auction in 2024.

Still real, still buyable

A genuine FIAM Ghost chair today runs around €3,600 in Europe (roughly $7,200 in the US through authorised dealers) — a price that reflects real specialist glass-forming production rather than a standard furniture manufacturing process. It's sold directly through FIAM and a number of authorised Italian-design retailers, and — like most heavily photographed design icons — has attracted cheaper glass-chair imitations that don't use FIAM's actual Paser process or match its tested load rating, so it's worth buying from a recognised dealer rather than a generic "glass chair" listing if the real piece is what you want. If your budget is closer to a few hundred pounds than a few thousand, Heller's Calla chases the same one-piece idea in moulded plastic, and the clear acrylic Bullet table shows the same look at the other end of the price scale.

For other chairs built around a genuinely unconventional material rather than upholstery, see our pieces on the Wassily chair (tubular steel, borrowed from a bicycle frame) and the Barcelona chair (hand-tufted from a single hide of leather) — three completely different materials, the same standard of real design history behind each. For glass used at a much larger, room-scale level, see Scavolini's Living Crystal kitchen, patterned by Karim Rashid, and for a piece with the same kind of genuine, juried design-award recognition applied to public rather than domestic furniture, see the Botanic Twist bench from TF Urban.