Designer We Love: Brit Kleinman
Inspired by her international travels, Brooklyn-based designer Brit Kleinman hand-paints leather to create geometric, one-of-a-kind rugs, pillows, and wall coverings.
Hometown: Los Angeles, California.
Current Home: Brooklyn, New York. Kleinman’s home and studio are a ten-minute walk apart in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. Her airy studio, which she came across while delivering a rug to a client a year ago, is on a lower level of a former warehouse building, with floor-to-ceiling windows. Kleinman keeps all of her supplies around the edges of the room, spreading out the various hides she’s creating on the floor.
Design Philosophy: “I get very excited about travelling and getting to see different ways people live. My design process starts with looking at the historical side of the product. I’ll spend months researching different techniques. The other side is getting my hands dirty—seeing what works and what doesn’t, and being very hands-on about it. It’s that happy medium between the book side and finding inspiration from the material itself.”
Signature Piece: The Painted Plains series of cowhide rugs, which feature bold geometric patterns in a range of blue and black stains on natural, full-grain leather, were the first pieces to come out of the studio. “As I launch new products and categories, that collection will always be the signature—it summarizes my whole approach,” says Kleinman.
Aesthetic in Five Words (or Less): Distinctively modern with classic materials.
What’s in a Name: On a life-changing trip to Guatemala in 2006, Kleinman saw a man in a street market carrying a large sack of avocados on his head. The image awakened her understanding of design as a cultural concept “based on where you are, and how that dictates the way people use color, or how they carry things.” When it came time to give her company a name, she went with AVO, a shortened version of avocado. “In addition to the meaning,” says Kleinman, “I also really like that these are very simple shapes, similar to the pattern work I do, which is bold and geometric but also about simple techniques reworked in new ways.”
The Design Process: Before putting brush to leather, Kleinman experiments on smaller scraps to get a general idea of where she wants the work to go, though often the shape and movement of the individual hide will inspire the pattern. Her natural colors work more like wood stains than paint, with a drying time of about 24 hours. Once the color sets, Kleinman seals the exposed natural leather with a finishing coat, making it fade-proof and durable to walk on.
Resume Standouts: A graduate of the industrial design program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kleinman got her first job designing for Samsonite before moving on to Timberland and then becoming head bag designer at Jack Spade. After five years with the company (where she got her start working with leather), she launched AVO in 2014.
What’s Next: Kleinman just wrapped work as one of the 24 designers chosen by Luxe magazine to design a room for a showcase in the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills (on view November 7th through the 22nd). At AVO, upcoming collections will feature leather wall coverings, including hand-painted tiles.
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