A smile in his sights

Wearing cowboy boots and a big Texan belt buckle, Alexander Reh doesn’t look like a gifted young furniture designer based in Brooklyn, New York. But, having grown up in Houston, the 28-year-old now describes himself as a “Texynite” – urbane but with country roots. And that includes donning a cowboy hat while hosting barbecues in his back yard.

His interest in design was nurtured by his parents; his father is an architect and his mother, originally a “stay-at-home mom”, went back to university to study to be an interior designer. He recalls her telling him not to jump on the Eames chair as a child – “it took me a few years to realise what that meant” – and she took him to local Houston museums, including the outstanding Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel.

He went on to attend the city’s prestigious High School for Performing and Visual Arts, with its curriculum split between academic studies and studio classes. The school regularly welcomed representatives from colleges such as Parsons, the New School for Design, Cooper Union and The Pratt Institute, all in New York, and the Rhode Island School of Design. As a result of those presentations, Reh was inspired to pursue industrial design. He enrolled at Pratt, one of the leading arts colleges in the US.

True to his Texas upbringing, his designs are inspired by a passion for hunting and fishing. His father’s company owned a 2,600-acre ranch in Del Rio close to the Mexican border and as a teenager he shot birds, such as chuckar, pheasants and quail. Although he rarely hunts now, he still uses weaponry to make furniture, gaining satisfaction in giving objects of destruction a creative, non-threatening use. “Hum­our is largely founded in illuminating truth where you might not expect it,” he says. His focus is “constructive witticism – the physical construction of humour that tests the limits of feasibility and absurdity”.

Inspiration for his graduation project, The Fully Loaded Chair, which uses 400 loaded, 12-gauge shotgun shells fitted into a powder-coated steel frame, came on a hunting trip to Industry, Texas, a beautiful, unspoilt area famed for its rough limestone terrain and enormous oak trees. The chair has bright brass tips on top and is meant to create “a powerful allure and odd dichotomy of comfort and demise between furniture and weaponry”.

Although Reh’s first plan was to work as a designer until he could support himself as a fine artist, he is increasingly excited about the “design art” market and currently working on two new projects. Milky Way is a chandelier constructed from 14 empty gallon-sized plastic milk containers, a hula hoop, a clothesline and numerous other domestic cast-offs, while Deflower is a vase made from multi-coloured condoms and juice glasses. He’s also developing his own brand and a website and working on a variety of commissions.

His main criticism of the Pratt education was its minimal emphasis on the business side of design and particularly on how to protect original concepts and creations with patents, trademarks and copyrights. He also thinks some instructors were too rigid and that the programme lacked an overall theme. But, on the positive side, students were free to pursue their own activities and in the final year they shared a large room known as the Thesis Studio, where they could work on different projects as they wished. This is where Reh started introducing humour into his work, creating the Urban Assault Trowel, a standard garden trowel using elements of hand-to-hand weaponry.

After graduation, he struggled to pay his New York rent and bills, which are considerably higher than those in Texas, and was left with very little to “start pumping into the line of projects waiting to be started”. He eventually took a full-time job with a design company but “it leaves little creative fuel in the tank for my own work”, he says. “I’ve been attempting to grind through and find some sort of balance.”

Edgar Harden, a New York-based furniture and decorative arts specialist who was there when Reh presented his thesis at Pratt, was impressed by the Fully Loaded Chair, especially the way it imaginatively and skilfully incorporates personal history. He hounded the designer for more than a year to get the project into production, then invited him to exhibit in a show of young talents that he was curating at the Max Lang Gallery.

Harden sees Reh as one of an emerging group of American designers who are breaking away from the US design tradition favouring utilitarian objects because “if it’s not useful, no one will buy it”.

So far, the Texan is showing just the right kind of free-spirited creativity.

www.alexanderreh.com