Head to Design Miami/ this winter to see the iconic designer’s new collection.

The history of 20th-century design is peppered with stories of individuals falling in love with materials. Finland’s Mr Alvar Aalto had plywood, which he transformed, via steam bending, into the curvaceous organic forms of his furniture for Artek. France’s Mr Mathieu Matégot saw powder-coated steel mesh and, ingeniously, thought “coffee table”, “chair” and “lamp”. And then there is Mr Charles Hollis Jones, a child prodigy from Indiana who moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, at the age of 16, and proceeded to set up CHJ Designs, creating startling, revolutionary furniture with a new material: a glass-like form of plastic called Lucite.

Never formally educated in design (beyond a course of night classes at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles), Mr Jones nonetheless spent the 1960s working for prestigious design companies in Los Angeles before setting up his own showroom in 1970. His particular brand of genius was to take a material that until then had never been used for anything but small jewellery pieces and handbags (as well as military applications) and use it to create sophisticated, sculptural designs for furniture and art pieces. His work in the medium won him a variety of famous fans, from Mr Frank Sinatra to the author and playwright Mr Tennessee Williams, for whom the designer created his “Wisteria” chair in 1968.

Though Lucite furniture is largely something we associate with the 1960s and 1970s, it has never lost its lustre for Mr Jones, who now lives and works in Burbank, CA. Testimony to this fact is an exhibition of spectacular new works from the designer at this year’s Design Miami/ fair, which opens this week ahead of Art Basel Miami Beach. Given that the interior stylings of the 1970s, and Lucite in particular, are currently mid-revival, it’s a timely opportunity to see a master of the form at his best.

Charles Hollis Jones runs at Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, from 30 November to 4 December