The Bullet Coffee Table: Alexandra von Furstenberg's Acrylic Diamond

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The Bullet coffee table is built to be looked through. There's no solid top and no obvious frame — just a long, faceted shape of clear acrylic that catches the light like a cut stone. Alexandra von Furstenberg designed it, and when it appeared in 2010 it was priced at $15,000, which tells you something about how seriously the material is meant to be taken.

How a table is made from eighteen panels

The Bullet is constructed from 18 clear acrylic panels, joined at 18 junctions — nine across the top and nine below — in a pattern that reproduces the facets of a cut diamond. Because every edge is a bonded joint between two polished panels, the whole piece depends on precise cutting and clean seams: any flaw in an acrylic joint is visible from every angle, with nothing to hide it. The result is a shape with a large empty interior, sometimes described as a capacious negative space, which is where the table's "bullet" name comes from — and where some viewers see a coffin instead, an association the original write-ups on the table were well aware of.

The great trick of the design is transparency. A solid coffee table takes up visual room in a living area; the Bullet barely does. The shape is read through the table, so the rug, the floor and the sofa behind it all stay visible. That's the practical argument for acrylic furniture generally, and it's why the material has kept returning to the design world long after its first big moment.

The designer

Alexandra von Furstenberg was born in Hong Kong in October 1972, the youngest of three daughters of Robert Miller, the co-founder of the duty-free retailer DFS. She grew up between Hong Kong, Paris and New York, worked in fashion, and then moved into homeware: her eponymous furniture and accessories brand launched around 2007–2008 (sources differ on the exact year). The origin story is simple and credible — she started by designing acrylic furniture for her own home, realised there might be a market for similar pieces, and left fashion to build the business.

She's now based in Los Angeles and is known almost entirely for one idea: taking acrylic, a material that peaked in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s and then fell out of fashion, and using it in a deliberately luxurious way. Her references are Art Deco, the 1960s and futurism, which she combines with bright colour and clean geometry. The entire collection is made from acrylic — bowls, vases, coasters, picture frames, side tables and desks, as well as coffee tables like the Bullet — which gives the brand an unusually consistent look.

Why acrylic, and why it's harder than it looks

Acrylic (often sold under the brand name Lucite) is lighter than glass, much less likely to shatter and easier to shape, but it has its own limits. It scratches more readily than glass and shows fingerprints, so a table like this needs a soft cloth and a plastic-safe cleaner rather than household glass spray. A well-made acrylic piece also depends on the thickness and polish of its panels, and on how cleanly they're bonded — which is why a table like this is a fabricated, finished object rather than something you could cut and glue together at home.

The Bullet sat inside a wider collection of clean, geometric acrylic tables — the Sledge coffee table, the Brilliant square coffee table and the On the Rocks cube side table among them. As of October 2026, though, the brand's own online store shows a "Store unavailable" message, and I couldn't find a statement explaining why, so I can't tell you it is still selling direct (which is also why this page doesn't link to it). Her pieces still circulate through independent design retailers and secondhand dealers such as 1stDibs, so that's where to look if you want a Bullet.

For another coffee table that is more sculpture than furniture, see Wendell Castle's Sizzle, whose rounded pods come from a completely opposite instinct — organic and handmade where the Bullet is crystalline and engineered — or Seltz's Pentagon table, where a dining table's structure is the feature, in solid wood rather than acrylic. And for transparency applied to seating, there's FIAM's Ghost chair, formed from a single sheet of curved glass, or the clear version of Heller's Calla chair, moulded in plastic.