Some great ideas come to you in unexpected places, like the kitchen counter. In 1967, designer Maria Pergay’s idea for her Ring chair was born while peeling an orange for her children with one single cut. Born in Romania to Russian parents, she was just six years old e immigrated to France with her mother in 1937 to escape the Soviet invasion (only to go into hiding when the Nazis invaded during World War II). Pergay went on to study costume and set design at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris and became known for her shop window displays and metalwork. These small metalworks were lauded and purchased by fashion heavyweights like Christian Dior, artists like Salvador Dali, and designers like Pierre Cardin.

Uginox, a major French stainless-steel producer that had heard about her work in metal, approached Pergay to ask if she would be willing to use steel for her work. She responded by saying that steel would not be the appropriate material for her small works but would be a good medium for furniture. One of the first two pieces Pergay produced using steel was the Chaise Anneaux (Ring Chair). She gathered a team of skilled metalworkers to help her fabricate the pieces, pushing them beyond the limits of conventional fabrication at times, guiding their hands when making the cut, directing them to ply and re-ply entire sheets, until the precise forms she envisioned in her imagination were a reality. The Ring is formed from concentric steel halos, their centers meeting at a sharp point to form the seat, all resting atop a pair of sabre legs.

When asked why she made furniture out of steel, Pergay responded that it was because she had a score to settle with Stalin. “You know his name means steel? So the more I hit it, the happier I am.”

Only about 50 Ring chairs were produced. The examples that are not in the permanent collections of museums fetch high prices on the secondary market. The pair shown here sold in 2016 at Wright’s Design Masterworks auction for $85,000. As Pergay told the New York Times in 1970, “Copper is too fragile, aluminum too light, gold too symbolic, silver too weak; bronze is out of fashion and platinum inaccessible. Nothing is more beautiful than steel.”