Shiro Kuramata studied architecture at Tokyo Polytechnic in Tokyo until 1953. Then he spent a year working for Teikokukizai, the Japanese furniture manufacturer. Until 1956 Shiro Kuramata studied interior design at the Kuwazawa Institute for Design in Tokyo In 1965 he founded his own design practice. As an interior designer, Shiro Kuramata designed more than three hundred bars and restaurants and also designed furniture. Shiro Kuramata became famous overnight in 1977 for the S-shaped, curvilinear "Drawer in an Irregular Form", a piece of storage furniture in black stained ash with the drawer fronts lacquered white. 
In the 1980s, Shiro Kuramata designed numerous sensational pieces of furniture, for which he used unusual materials or invented entirely new uses.