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Working with funky colors and shapes, a design duo gives an ancient technique up-to-the-minute panache. In this age of high-impact polymers and tongue-twisiting synthetics, it's difficult to imagine youg creative types embracing a technique that their brethren would probably consider as outdated as macrame. But when Elissa Ehlin, a New York interior decorator and color theorist, and James Leritz, a furniture designer for Blu Dot and Deform, saw their commissions dry up in the wake of 9/11, the couple decided to get back to basics. They began experimenting with a secondhand kiln they purchased for $100 and soon found themselves masters of enameling, the practically prehistoric method of bonding colored molten glass to metal. Today the work of Kiln, the pair's three-year-old company is turning heads, gracing tables, and giving the age-old craft an unmistakable groove.
Ehlin and Leritz, together with a six-person team in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, design objects as diverse as plates and bowls, bud vases, wall plaques, and jewelry. And their wares are winning unlikely fans. Last December, Bergdorf Goodman launched an exclusive line of Kiln items made of enamel on sterling silver (including glass-and-silver chopsticks). Manhattan restaurant Sushi Samba outfitted its waitresses in Kiln necklaces. Barneys New York carries their plates and platters of enamel on copper. And fashion icon Kate Spade asked the company to create bowls and a mobile for her home collection as well as signage for her stores.
So what's the appeal of this time-honored process?
Enamel can be silky smooth or deliberately drippy, its saturated jewel-tone colors run the gamut from opaque to transparent, and it goes straight from the oven to the table. "It's fired at 1,500 degrees, so putting it in a 450-degree oven isn't going to hurt it," explains Ehlin. But she and Leritz have even bigger plans, if only someone would ask them.
"I would love to have a commissioni for an entire bathroom," she says, smiling. "You can clean enamel with Windex, and you wouldn't need to use any grout. An enamel bathroom would be so beautiful." MITCHELL OWENS
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