Chrome & Riveted Coat Rack, Yasuaki Sasamoto for Dulton, Japanese, circa 1980

When Yasuaki Sasamoto founded Dulton in Japan in the early 1980s, he was responding to a paradox that industrial civilisation had produced: the very moment when the great factories, warehouses, and machine halls of the early twentieth century were being demolished or converted into lofts, their visual vocabulary—chrome, rivets, cast iron, working steel—became objects of intense aesthetic desire. Dulton’s genius was to recognise this desire and give it form: not as reproduction, but as re-imagination, applying the grammar of the factory floor to domestic objects of serious material quality that belonged equally to the workshop and the salon.

This coat rack exemplifies the Dulton method at its most confident. At 180.5 centimetres tall—almost exactly human height—it commands the entrance hall with the authority of industrial equipment, yet its chromium surfaces are finished to the standard of a luxury object. The rivets that articulate the joints are both structural and declarative: they insist on the language of assembly, of the bolt-and-rivet engineering that built bridges and ships and gasometers, here applied to a domestic coat rack. Chrome, in this context, is not a luxury finish but the coating of the instrument—the bicycle frame, the surgical table, the machine part—elevated from the factory to the foyer without losing any of its original conviction.

Japanese design, circa 1980, in fine condition commensurate with its age. Dimensions: W. 66 cm × D. 66 cm × H. 180.5 cm.