Ridge Residential Design × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
We press the marks of businesses we admire into leather before any conversation has taken place, because some marks ask for it. This August the mark belonged to Ridge Residential Design.
A August study.
The firm
Ridge Residential Design is Kristin Farnan's practice in Summit, New Jersey, a "Full-service residential design firm specializing in renovation management, interior & exterior design." She founded it after two decades in media and technology, though the real beginning sits further back: childhood trips to building and fabric stores while her parents rebuilt family homes, then fifteen years of overseeing renovations on her own houses and for friends before the work announced what it was. The firm's promise is an organized path through a renovation, from the first decisions all the way to completion, alongside the architects and builders a project gathers. Their work is at ridgeresidentialdesign.com.
Pressed
The monogram carries no words, which for our purposes is a gift. Two mirrored R-like curves lean into a central seam. Their diagonal legs open into a triangular roofline, and a four-pane window sits square beneath the peak. A long baseline holds the house down, while a small notch at the top center reads like a drafting marker. We kept every element intact in the die, down to the four separate window panes and the full run of the baseline.
We pressed it upright on our luggage tags, since the house has to stand. Blueberry answers the deep navy we sampled from the mark, the #012A4A that fills the official file. Gray-sand is the site's pale fields translated into leather, a greige with the calm of a material board. Between them sits a black tag with the monogram in gold foil, the one press in our line that carries metal, because a mark this composed can hold a formal register. A tag like this spends its life on the tote that ferries fabric samples between houses, which felt right to us.
At all turns
The companion design needed a single object that could hold the whole story. Farnan's account of the firm begins in the aisles of building and fabric stores, a child trailing parents who were rebuilding family homes; the grown firm's stated principle is that "form must meet function at all turns." A carpenter's tape measure belongs to both sentences. So we let one draw the house.
Out of its case, the blade runs the floor. It climbs the far wall and breaks over the roof peak. It comes down the other side and stops one pull short of closing, the metal end hook hanging just above the case. Every corner of the house is literally a turn of the tape. Our first sketches closed the outline, and the drawing died on the page; complete, it had nothing left to want. The open gap turned out to be the design, a renovation held at the moment before completion, which is the moment a firm like this is hired for.
On the tags the tape keeps its case and its tick marks. Blueberry and gray-sand take blind deboss, the drawing sunk into the leather with no ink at all. On black the blade runs in gold foil, and here the foil earns its keep, since a real tape blade is yellow; on black leather the gold reads as the tool, drawn out and glinting.
The keychain fob wants a plainer press, so there the design sheds its case and thickens its blade, the same house scaled to sit centered below the rivet. We ran the duo in blueberry and gray-sand, blind deboss on both. We picture one on a set of house keys handed over when a project wraps – our picture, we should say, since Ridge Residential Design has never told us how they close a job.
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 Ridge Residential Design and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.