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 I graduated Bates College in 1969 with a degree in Political Science. I started making and selling silver and gold jewelry in 1969 in Ithaca, NY as a self-taught jeweler. I took time off in 1978 to get my MFA at the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It was while I was at RIT that I discovered aluminum as a material and metal machining as a creative subtractive process.
Though my work had started to move past jewelry when I was in graduate school, I returned to jewelry as a means to make a living after finishing school. This time, however, the jewlery was made of aluminum with colored epoxy resin inlays. In 1981, while doing a show in Rochester, an interior designer saw my pieces and asked if I worked bigger. The result was a 30" x 40" aluminum table top with a purple epoxy patterned inlay. I made more aluminum and epoxy tables over the next couple of years. |
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All Handler Studio furniture is produced on a custom basis.
My goal is to design furniture to suit the specific location in your home or business. I can get information about your site from photographs, blueprints, floorplans CAD views, or, best of all, from housecalls. The design process often becomes a collaborative process between my clients and myself. When visiting a potential client’s home or office, the first part of the process is for me to look and listen, to make myself sensitive to their needs. Considerations for me become the aesthetics of the setting, the use of the room, the sense of design I observe in the home or office, and, most of all, the client’s wishes and feelings. |
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My furniture is primarily made of aluminum. Most pieces are fabricated in my studio, which is essentially a machine shop. Some of the pieces, particularly chairs, are sandcast. The fabricated pieces are either powdercoated or anodized. Sometimes, both finishes are incorporated into a single piece of furniture. Anodizing is an electro-chemical process, which imparts a very hard, permanent, scratch resistant surface to the aluminum, which can, as part of the process, be colored with a wide variety of vivid hues. Some of these colors are reminiscent of the aluminum cold drink glasses from the 1950’s. The color range is greens, blues, reds and pinks, purples and violets, gold to oranges, clear, and grays to black. The texture of the anodized surface can be satin, smooth or high polished. I have twenty-three standard colors (Color chip sets are available to clients in the course of working out commissions.) and I often develop custom colors for my clients. |
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These color chips represent the standard available colors for powder coating the metal furniture components. Custom colors are also available.  Color Chip 1  Color Chip 2  Color Chip 3 |
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