Brad Ascalon Carries On the Designing Tradition

Design

By creating everything from menorahs to cutting-edge furniture, Brad Ascalon is carrying on a family legacy

In 2001, Brad Ascalon was a 24-year-old Rutgers grad working in the marketing department at Atlantic Records and watching the music industry begin its first big post-Napster freefall. After 9/11, his whole division was laid off. He got a new job doing radio promotion at Elektra, only to be laid off again a year later. “I had a quarter-life crisis — I did some soul searching,” says the Philadelphia native. “I come from three generations of artists and I finally said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done fighting it.’” Ascalon applied to the Pratt Institute’s graduate program in industrial design, got in and began following in the footsteps of his late grandfather (Maurice, sculptor and Judaica designer), uncle (Adir, Surrealist painter) and father (David, mosaic and stained-glass artist), for whom he’d apprenticed as a teenager.

"I come from three generations of artists and I finally said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done fighting it.'"

When he set up his own studio in 2006, Ascalon did break from the family legacy in one small but important way: he resolved to be not just a great designer, but a great businessman, too, a balance he’s been striving for ever since. “My grandfather and uncle were more focused on the creative, less so on successfully translating that creativity into a business,” says Ascalon, who says he still buys pieces made by Pal-Bell, Maurice’s critically-beloved line that includes Judaica pieces, in thrift stores for next to nothing.

For the past several years, Ascalon has been harnessing the skills he developed in his pre-design days to ensure a steady stream of clients, ranging from Italian hardware companies to cosmetics brands to the blue-chip retailer Design Within Reach, with whom he launched a collection of marble-topped tables. In his home studio on the Upper East Side, he spends 85 percent of his time doing research for briefs and the rest modeling the results on his computer (on the rare occasion that he needs to make a one-off and limited editions by hand, he decamps to his dad’s workshop outside of Philly). One of his studio walls is lined from top to bottom with renderings of current projects and CAD drawings of new chairs, door handles and sofas, many of them destined for the contract market.

The wall of Ascalon’s studio includes “What Would Tobias Wong Do?,” a limited edition print and tribute to his late friend and colleague who died in 2010.

Front: Initial prototype of “Piet” LED task lamp. Back: Prototype of lamp by Ascalon and Frederick McSwain for Neal Feay studio.

Ascalon in his studio, whose walls are covered with past, present, and future design projects.

Each cork from Osprey’s Dominion 2005 Cabernet Franc signifies Ascalon’s first job with a new company.

Prototypes of the menorah Ascalon made for Design Within Reach.

A computer rendering of Ascalon’s Atlas coffee table, also for DWR.

Even when Ascalon is conceiving a straightforward hotel sofa or hospital fixture, though — the kinds of things that require an extremely high level of attentiveness to his clients’ needs — he insists that there’s still “an expression of me in everything I do.” His new mid-century-inflected Atlas tables for DWR are a good example. “When I designed them, I was thinking about the breadth of design history under DWR’s brand,” he recalls. “How do I design something to fit perfectly with both an Eames lounge and more contemporary pieces? There’s a cleanliness to the Atlas that works in so many scenarios. It was a business decision, really, to recognize that at the end of the day it had to appeal to a large audience.” But look closely enough, and you realize that the sleek geometries, material choices and joinery details are all pure Ascalon. No wonder the designer he respects the most is Russell Wright, whose unassumingly practical ceramics reached iconic status by persuading ordinary Americans to embrace Modernism in the ’30s and ’40s.

The Atlas tables are actually Ascalon’s second product for DWR’s in-house line, the first being a piece that’s equally understated but even more personal: a minimalist marble menorah. Its only obvious design details are two sliced edges that make an 18-degree angle, a highly symbolic number in the Jewish religion. Ascalon designed the piece partly for practical reasons — the ability to display your fancy-schmancy menorah like a sculpture even after Hannukah ends — and doesn’t plan on delving further into the niche of his forebearers. But, it was also an attempt to thank them, in a way, for bestowing on him the yin to his yang. “If it wasn’t for them,” he says, “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”