Why people are prepared to pay £400,000 for a cabinet made by the Italian designer.

At Art Basel Miami Beach this June, a one-off cabinet from the Italian designer Mr Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) sold for £400,000. This was not only a huge price for a piece of furniture, but an indication of the way things are going. In the past few years, design has begun to attract serious collectors. It’s increasingly being bought and sold in the same way as fine art.

It may be that Mr Sottsass’s work is, for want of a better word, trending, a concept that is anathema to the concept of good design. But given the fact that today’s design connoisseurs are looking for pieces that are unique, special, somehow out of the ordinary, it’s easy to see why. As the mastermind behind the Memphis design collective, Mr Sottsass spent the 1980s flying in the face of design common sense. He discarded mid-century modernism’s penchant for minimalist, adaptable and mass-producible pieces and instead proffered mad creations such as the “Carlton” bookcase, an angular, precarious-looking explosion of multi-coloured blocks, which was not just aesthetically astonishing but eye-wateringly expensive. A formula for everyday living this was not.

Such DayGlo shock tactics are not the beginning and end of Mr Sottsass’s oeuvre, though. As is elucidated by an exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical, which opens on 21 July at The Met Breuer in New York, Mr Sottsass was a polymathic designer whose influence upon contemporary design is both as deep and wide-ranging as his output, which stretched to architecture, interiors, machines, textiles, painting and photography. The exhibition promises to cover his career in full, from his pioneering work as the design consultant for Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti in the 1950s and 1960s, to his lesser-known later works, which will be displayed in dialogue with pieces by artists and designers including Messrs Piet Mondrian, Gio Ponti and Shiro Kuramata. Though our understanding of Mr Sottsass is often coloured by his Memphis work, which is inherently tied to the optimistic futurism of the decade in which it was produced, one section of the exhibition will show how he drew upon the forms of ancient and archaeological objects, bringing together ceramics and furniture originally created for exhibitions in the 1970s.

Needless to say, for anyone interested in Mr Sottsass’s oeuvre and the history of contemporary design, this is a must-see. If you simply want to find out what a £400,000 cupboard looks like, you might want to head along, too. Its buyer has kindly agreed to lend this prize to the museum for the duration of the exhibition.

Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical runs from 21 July to 8 October 2017 at the Met Breuer, New York