Leah Ring on Fabricating Fantasy

October 7, 2022

One look at the Ferngully Collection by Leah Ring, and you feel a step further from reality. Leah designs her object collections around the idea of creating an instant escape. “I want people to step into a different world, to feel something different,” she says. “Like they’re stepping back in time, into a fantasy, or they’re on a different planet.”

Leah started her company Another Human in 2017 with the intention to create without compromise. “I like not having to edit my vision for anybody,” she says. She shares her Los Angeles studio with her fiancé, a painter. “It’s been very interesting sharing a space with a different sort of artist,” Leah says. “Especially during the pandemic, it was lovely to have somebody else to sort of get creative feedback from.”

The studio’s big windows allow her to examine the colors and materials for projects in natural light, which is crucial to her work. The big things come together here after-hours, when she can sit down and have uninterrupted time.

“The nature of being an interior designer is that when jobs are in construction, your phone is blowing up every five minutes,” Leah says. With six projects currently in the works, the buzzes and beeps only multiply. “Yesterday, no joke—I was at eight locations before noon,” Leah says. When she has time to herself to focus on one thing, she makes the most of it. “Music is essential. Coffee is essential,” she laughs.

It is in these moments that Leah can put together her fantasy worlds. The last two years of pandemic anxiety and a collective sense of being trapped amplified her urge to create “other” spaces and products. Building an escape, something fantastic and fun, is a much larger trend that Leah embraces completely. “I love the Ferngully Chair because it looks like you could sit in it, and it could walk away with you in it,” she says.

Now that the pandemic is dying down (and with it the high demand from interior design clients), Leah plans to devote more energy to product design. “It’s very creatively fulfilling for me,” she says. “In interior design there are functional needs, but with my furniture I can get more conceptual.” She hopes to work with new materials, especially glass, and push it to new levels. “I know enough about how things are built, but because I’m not a fabricator my sort of naivete does me well because I’m constantly pushing my fabricators to try things they’ve never done before.”