Rare Double Faux-Marble Resin Coffee Table on Chrome Legs by Willy Rizzo, circa 1970

This rare and spectacular coffee table, designed by Willy Rizzo around 1970, is among the most inventive furniture designs to emerge from the extraordinary decade of Belgian and Italian design that transformed the international decorating world. The piece is composed of two independent tables—each with a top in faux-marble resin—mounted on slender chrome legs of deliberately different heights, creating the striking visual illusion that the tops are suspended in the air at different levels.

The use of faux-marble resin, a material at the cutting edge of innovation in the 1970s, allows the tops to simulate the appearance of marble whilst benefiting from the technical advantages of synthetic production—uniformity of colour, resilience, and the possibility of bold scale. The discreet chrome legs, reduced to the absolute minimum necessary to support the surfaces, reinforce the floating effect that is the defining formal conceit of the design.

Willy Rizzo (1928–2013), born in Naples and working primarily in Paris and Brussels, was renowned both as a photographer—his portraits of mid-century celebrities are icons of their era—and as a furniture designer whose work combined Italian brio with French elegance. His furniture pieces, produced in limited quantities, are today eagerly collected as important examples of the luxury design of the 1970s.