Local Love: Umanoff Design

We love collaborations. It all began for us with the collaboration of Kyle's metal & wood with Johannah's mosaics, and we often find our most satisfying work is collaborative in nature. Whether working with a client to create a custom piece, or working on a project with another maker, we love the process of bringing two unique perspectives together to create something altogether new. Lately we've been working on some great projects with awesome local companies, and we want to share these talented makers with you!

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Photo by Umanoff Design

Kyle worked with Wendy Umanoff of Umanoff Design to create a gorgeous chandelier that now hangs in the lobby of the Valentine Richmond History Center. With a background in fine arts, Wendy specializes in lighting design, and creates one-of-a-kind accessories and furniture as well. She works with vintage and reclaimed findings, often combining them in surprising ways to create unique textures in her creations.

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Photos by Umanoff Design

For the Valentine chandelier, Wendy designed a large-scale, delightfully whimsical piece created from reclaimed vintage fixtures as well as hand-forged elements made by Kyle and wire & crystal embellishments handmade by local jewelry designer Karyn Shonk. Check out the great piece on Wendy's blog for lots more process and installation photos and stop by the Valentine to see it in person!

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Photos 1 & 3 by Umanoff Design

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Photo by Umanoff Design

The boss of mosaic coat racks

We recently finished a commissioned coat rack based on our line of mosaic coat racks in reclaimed wood frames with hand-forged hooks. This big guy, however, was almost four times as big as our usual coat racks!

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The client's hallway rug was the source of inspiration for both the colors and the design.

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Pulling together the color palette and sketching out design ideas.

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Johannah used grout lines and andamento, the visual flow created by the placement of the tesserae (tiles), to create a sense of movement and balance of colors similar to the rug.

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Kyle created a reclaimed wood frame twice as wide as our usual frames to support both the physical and visual weight of the mosaic. He added his V-style hand-forged hooks to complete the piece.

A few custom coat racks

We first introduced our line of mosaic coat racks with hand-forged hooks and a reclaimed wood frame last fall, and they have turned out to be such a fun item!  We love that they bring together all three components of our work: metal, mosaics, and wood. They're a colorful, unique way to dress up a functional household item. And there's lots of room to make them personal, whether in color, theme, or material. Here are a few of our favorite custom coat racks so far:

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One of our very first custom coat racks was for our smaller two-hook version.

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This was our first coat rack with a frame in reclaimed walnut rather than pine. We loved it so much, we made it a standard part of our coat rack repertoire.

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Arranging the palette for a blue and white mosaic based on the very first one we made in green and white.

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This one incorporates personal objects collected by the client. It was a joy and an honor to put together such a meaningful piece.

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Here's a completed (non-custom) coat rack with hooks installed. For more customization fun, we have two styles of hooks: the V on this coat rack, and a more traditional U style.