Country Pick 2017 / / Professional

TIRAR

• Company
  TIRAR, Australia
• Lead Designer
  Felice Carlino
• Design Team
  Felice Carlino
• Project Link
  view

TIRAR introduction
“The door handle is the handshake of the
building”, said Finnish architect, educator
and writer, Juhani Pallasma.
Unfortunately, many commercially available
door handles simply don’t do their buildings
justice – the architectural
equivalent of a limp handshake.

This is what inspired designer Felice Carlino
to design a range of solid timber door
furniture.

A Focus on Touch
As an interior designer himself, Carlino was
searching for a full-timber door pull for an
accommodation pod he was
designing. “Everything I found was a
combination of timber and metal, which didn’t
look very nice, and also didn’t
feel comfortable in the hand. So I decided to
design my own.”

The concept was a solid timber door pull and
lever that was beautiful to look at and
beautiful to hold. It was very
important to me that the door furniture not
only looks beautifully simple and elegant, but
was also delicate to
touch,” Carlino continues. “How it feels is
equally important as how it looks.”

Design for Humans
This sensual approach led the design of a
handle that would intuitively respond to the
mechanical workings of the
fingers and hands. “Fingers are made up of
three joints that wrap themselves around the
grip,so we crafted a taper and
radius edges so the door pull and lever would
sit within the grip of the hand and also be
comfortable in more delicate
hands.”

Pleasurable Healthcare Design
The TIRAR family of door levers offers the
first opportunity to create healthcare and
accessible designs that are
visually warm and tactile, increasing the
quality of the interiors and the wellbeing of
residents and patients. “We
found that most healthcare products were
utilitarian and clinical in their design
approach. We wanted everyone to have
the opportunity to have access to beautiful
products, especially in their homes.”