O'Harra Mellette × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
O'Harra Mellette is an interior design firm and home-accessories boutique on North Dargan Street in Florence, South Carolina. The practice opened in 2006 as E Interiors, built by Gracelyn O'Harra Elmendorf from a studio-art background and a resolve to refocus after a personal tragedy. In 2011, after years of friendship and collaboration, Elizabeth "Liz" Mellette Andrews joined her, and the firm took a combined name chosen to honor both fathers and their shared work ethic. We find that a lovely thing to press into leather.
The homepage promises "Elegant Design" and "Interiors that reflect your style and enhance your life." The firm describes classic design with simple lines and "a spark of unexpected brilliance," borrows its palettes from nature, and lets antiques sit comfortably beside modern pieces. One current project carries the title "Beginning Again," a phrase that rhymes quietly with the founding story. We took the sentence about brilliance as our brief for everything below.
Pressed – the lockup on a lengthwise trio
The O'Harra Mellette lockup is wide, roughly three times as long as it is tall: a thin circular monogram above widely tracked serif capitals, with a small diamond holding the two family names apart. A mark of that ratio wants a lengthwise luggage tag with the strap to the left, so we pressed it faithfully across three of them. Gray-sand sits closest to the muted taupe we sampled from the official art. Dark espresso answers the deep browns of the firm's own site. The third tag is black and carries gold foil, a formal register those serif capitals wear well.
The spark line
The companion design comes straight from the firm's own words. We drew one long, level line, the simplest thing a hand can draw, and broke it once, just past two thirds of its length. In the break stands a small four-point spark. The line then resumes as if nothing had happened. That is the whole idea, and we resisted every urge to add to it.
On keychains the spark line runs wide across the fob face, centered below the rivet. We cut a duo. The golden-tan arizona fob takes a blind deboss; the black fob is pressed in gold foil, the one place in the companion set where the "spark of unexpected brilliance" is permitted a literal glint. Both are renders, and the gold reads brightest when the fob turns in the hand.
Dopp kits keep the mark modest. On a photographed stack of two bags, country gray above dark espresso, the spark line sits at compact maker's-mark scale in the lower right corner of each front face, blind debossed. Country gray is a warm gray-taupe with a brown undertone, and of all the leathers we cut it comes nearest to the taupe we sampled from the mark.
A catchall tray is where found objects actually land at the end of a day, which makes it a fitting home for a designer's device. Ours is golden-tan arizona, self-textured, with the spark line debossed generously across the center of the base, clear of the stitched border.
Leather journals close the study: a duo in gray-sand and dark espresso, the same two leathers that anchored the tag trio, each with the spark line pressed small in the lower right corner. Whether a design studio still sketches on paper is a question we could argue either way. We suspect this one does.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're O'Harra Mellette and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.