Ghost chairs — and tables — are multiplying

Starck created the iconic piece by taking a classic — the Louis XV armchair — and reinventing it using translucent injection-molded polycarbonate. The result is a rather substantial chair that appears to be there, and yet not.

Interior designers love it for its classic lines and ultramodern, translucent materials that allow it to blend in perfectly with a wide array of interior design styles. The same goes for its armless cousin, the Victoria Ghost chair.

The Louis Ghost chair, which has been copied by a lot of other manufacturers, is more whimsical and clever than weird and creepy as its name might imply.

Other designers, however, have taken the concept of ghost furniture and put their own spin on it by shaping transparent and ghostly white materials into some eerie-looking pieces.

In 2009, Valentina Gonzalez Wohlers, a Mexican-born designer based in London, created “The Ghost of a Chair” by draping sheets of 4-millimeter transparent acrylic over Louis XV chairs. The resulting piece, she explains in her product description, seems to wear an “invisibility cloak and will play tricks with your mind, especially when lighting is involved.” They can be commissioned through her website at www.valentinagw.com.

In 2010, Graft Lab, an architecture and design firm in Berlin, created a limited-edition Phantom dining table. It looks like a thick glossy cloth draped over a levitating table and is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of scenes from the 1982 film “Poltergeist.”

But the Graft Lab designers were inspired by the film “The Seven Year Itch,” in which Marilyn Monroe’s white dress blows up as she stands over a subway grate, according to the company’s website. The table was created using fiberglass and carbon fiber shaped to look like a tablecloth that is swaying, gathering momentum by the energy of the those seated around it and is about to take off when it reveals that there is no table underneath. “As if it never existed. A phantom.”

Actor Brad Pitt reportedly purchased one of the nine that were manufactured.

That same year, Snarkitecture ( www.snarkitecture.com), a design firm in Brooklyn that creates a lot of products that are not what they appear to be (a slab of concrete that looks like a fluffy pillow for an iPhone, for instance), built a prototype of a ghost chair out of reinforced fiberglass. It looks like a chair moving into a strong headwind that’s blowing its ghostly white slipcover.

In his product description for the Grand Illusion table, designer John Brauer explains how he was inspired by round cafe tables with square tablecloths while walking in Copenhagen, Denmark. He stopped to take photos then set about finding a plastic workshop that could create a version that looks like a tablecloth floating on air. Brauer’s original and copycats can be found at several online retailers.