Elements of Style: Harry Allen’s REALITY
Design wunderkind Harry Allen has elevated the objects of our every day lives and cast them in resin: a rabbit’s foot, a roller skate, his brother’s picture frame. Highly detailed, these objects cast in white, frosted, fluorescent green, chrome and even gold, appear to be the original but with more substance and weight. A bookshelf built from the casts of three books, a flower frog cast from the form of a toad. A cast hand is a wall hook, an incense holder, interchangeably a candle or vase holder, or even soap dish: eerie and gorgeous, like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.”
The beauty and humor of his REALITY line is compelling and contagious. Not only do his objects work in the most modern homes, but because of his almost baroque attention to detail, a pair of frosted candlesticks cast from his grandmother’s silver would look stunning in even the most traditional or Victorian room.
Harry Allen, an independent designer as well as a member of the hip New York City-based Areaware design collective, states:
“The search for decoration must go deep. Why apply arbitrary decoration when there are so many completely logical sources? Decoration from within. Materials. Structure. Process. A beautiful object is not decorated, it is the decoration.”
My Harry Allen favorites: the fruit bowl cast from a bunch of bananas and the groovy green roller skate Roller Stop, a doorstop or bookend cast from a roller skate (the nostalgia and happiness is almost instantaneous) which appeared on the cover of June 2009 Metropolitan Home and made the list of the top Design 10.
Scott Hamm
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