Memphis Hyatt black coffee table Ettore Sottsass 1984

Memphis Hyatt black is the coffee table designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1984 for Memphis Milano, originally conceived for a very personal purpose: to furnish his own home in Milan. Crafted in wood and finished with a refined glossy black lacquer on both the base and the top, Hyatt black embodies the eclectic and radical aesthetic of the Memphis movement, where form, colour and function intertwine in a deliberately provocative balance.

Unlike the wood veneer version featured in the original Memphis catalogue, this black edition carries a unique story: long out of production, Memphis Milano has chosen to rescue and reintroduce it, bringing it back into its current catalogue. With Hyatt, design becomes spectacle. As Barbara Radice wrote in 1981: "Memphis does not reject the functional utopia, but looks at function from a new, very open perspective, more like an anthropologist than like a marketing man." With its compact footprint — 430 mm in both width and depth and a height of 420 mm — Hyatt black is an ideal statement piece for refined residential interiors, particularly well suited to a living room or any space where a historically significant and visually striking design object is called for.