Asari Chair

The Asari Chair by Herman Miller is a study in duality: sculptural form and everyday function, upholstered and ergonomic, quiet and significant. Combined, it provides all the performance of an ergonomic work chair, in a form that is as comfortable as it is beautiful.

Behind the design

Naoto Fukasawa designed this chair with a clear goal: to inspire joy and create a new form, ultimately becoming the next upholstered icon. Considering the relationship between person, environment, and chair, Fukasawa looked to the world around him as inspiration—beginning with its name. Japanese for “clam” (short neck clam, to be precise), Asari’s rounded edges and sculpted segments give an anthropomorphic character to the chair. The smooth and calming surfaces of river stones and symmetrical tiers of a macaron influenced the sculptured prototypes Fukasawa and team hand-built to represent their vision of the design.

To turn the designer’s sculpted vision and forms into reality, our development teams needed to create new ways of constructing a chair. To achieve the clean stitching and visuals and ensure the chair would meet our rigorous standards, the team devised new methods to make the form.

The result is a meticulously crafted chair design where every form, stitch, and curve are essential: a purely iconic piece of furniture.