Chris Lehrecke & Ted Abramczyk

Ted Abramczyk was trained as an architect and received his B.Arch from the Pratt Institute. While completing his architectural apprenticeship at Davis Brody and Associates, he began to sculpt and in 1991, after winning a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Abramczyk left architectural practice to concentrate on art and design. In 1996 he founded Abramczyk Studio, a design firm that specializes in designing and handcrafting custom lighting fixtures for both residential and commercial clients. His art and architecture background is evident in his fixtures, which evolve out of variations on a geometric theme, and aim to unite functionality with the aesthetics of a glowing sculptural object. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 2012.

Chris Lehrecke’s talent as a designer and his exquisite skill as a craftsman have firmly established him within the New York design community. Although a member of a generation of furniture designers who came of age in the 1980s, he has pursued a stylistic direction antithetical to the highly individualistic and often intentionally provocative work that characterized much of the innovative design of that decade. Marked by clarity and restraint, his furniture exemplifies a rational yet organic approach to design. His latest “Weimar” collection, noticeably different for Lehrecke because of its strong colors, was inspired by the architecture of his youth, as built by his father, and the shapes and palette of the Bauhaus. All of his woodwork is made in his studio in upstate New York. He frequently collaborates with his wife, jewelry designer Gabriella Kiss, who fabricates bronze hardware, as on their “After the Storm” collection utilizing trees felled in storms.