In the loving home of a self-taught designer

Haris Rigalos is the case that if you have studied interior design, you tear up your degree and throw it straight in the trash. He himself is completely self-taught, the living proof that talent and aesthetics are ultimately qualities that you have within you, regardless of environment, studies and any origins.

The chairs he makes are usually found abandoned or in junk shops, in bad condition, and little by little, with the logic of recycling, he gives them the identity he wants. He designs, manufactures himself and also deals with the interior, creating an autonomous, his own, designed universe.

I met him at the “Teras” restaurant that he has opened in recent years with a group of his friends in Neo Kosmos. The shop is clearly imbued with its aesthetics and has been operating since the morning both as an exhibition space and as a shop. “You see a chair, you like it, you buy it”, this was, at least initially, the logic.

I can’t easily describe Haris’ style. It looks like “hipster deconstruction”. It’s like hitting with a hammer the outer shell of the hipster aesthetic and deep down you find a simplicity that is touching and not at all pretentious.

I didn’t design professionally, I didn’t know how to work with models, I did everything improvisationally. I had to do all this seriously. So I went into the workshop and said to work on the furniture. Because it was something tangible that would allow me to clearly show my aesthetic.

I visit him at his home in Pagrati – his workshop is downstairs. He tells me that the building was edited by Mouzakis and Panourgias, two old sculptors who lived there. His house was actually the old workshop of Panourgias and he found it like this, with the concrete on the ceiling. It was an empty, single space and he decided to turn it into a home. It is impressive because it looks like a Lilliputian loft, and a sweet light pours in through the frosted glass windows. “It’s wonderful to wake up here every morning, because it’s like the light is protecting you. You wake up lovingly,” he tells me.

Clean lines, a sideboard and a bookcase from a closed factory – you ask him “what is this now?” and he replies that it is a switchboard with many sockets that he found in a building. A bright yellow box. All seemingly incongruous that in a strange, own way balance out. “I wanted a living stillness,” he tells me.

The house and workshop directly below are working beautifully. The workshop is like the living room of the house. “Friends come, we play music, I create. So, in a way, both are spaces of creation. At home I design the work I do with the architectural offices, my clients, and in the workshop, downstairs, it becomes the most manual part with the furniture,” he says.

His life is like a movie that Guy Ritchie could have directed. Harry is not yet forty, but I find that he has lived three lives.

His first house was in Kato Patisia, but their mother found a small detached house in Zefyri and they left in the hope that the area would be upgraded after the metro. So they found themselves as a family in the “exotic Zephyri”, where they were to have very powerful adventures. He describes his adolescence as “wild”.

“The school was exactly as you imagine a school in Zefyri during the time of Triantafyllopoulos, when the area was a ghetto. I often remember shots being fired and us hiding under the tables,” he says.

He himself worked in construction from the age of fourteen. There he came into contact with many materials that fascinated him and recorded them, without knowing what he could do with them. However, he kept them inside.

Looking back on those years now, those years had a harshness to them. “You lose something of the initial carelessness when you work from six in the morning, then go to afternoon school and at night you want to be out and have fun with your friends. I managed to do everything. But this also had a price, early on.” I remind him of what Marguerite Diras has said: “From very early in my life it was too late.”

I eagerly ask him how he came into contact with the interior. Because their father’s house was not big and he wanted autonomy, in his twenties he built himself a studio on the roof and this was the first indication that he “has” it with his own hands. It was a great satisfaction that he made something the way he thought and wanted it, all by himself – and made it beautiful. But in those years the interior was not thought of even for fun.

His studies were in Music Technology, because from the age of seventeen he had already started dealing with electronic music, with big parties and events he did with his group “beyond imagination”. “There was a kind of faith and innocence in all of us who loved electronic music in those early years,” he tells me.

The first house he catches on his own is in Gazi. In order to pay for school, he also got a job in a courier company, it went well, he ended up becoming a partner. But something inside him, like with music and throwing parties, told him it wasn’t what he really wanted to do. That’s how he left the company. This was the pivotal moment when he allowed himself to listen to what he really wanted to do. He got a job in a bar, and that seemed to him like college, like a second adolescence, decidedly more carefree than the first. “I had learned to wake up early for construction, write 250 kilometers a day on a motorbike and suddenly I was being paid to drink – a holiday. From this job I gained time, which turned out to be a great gift. It is the time when I started making collages and writing down my thoughts and some poems that came to me spontaneously.

“My girlfriend at the time brought home some big photos of minimal buildings that she found in the trash and I said, ‘oh, great, here’s where we can stick things’, and that’s how the composition began. I started making her first collage to give her as a gift. I think both music and collages revealed my compositional ability. I started to feel good about it, others liked it too. At the same time, I continued to write. There’s a series of short stories in a drawer, but I don’t know if I’ll take it out. However, writing is my psychotherapy.”

When it came to music, he was always strict with himself. With words and collages he found a freedom, his relationship with them became more experiential. But he had never thought in terms of creation, he had always thought in terms of survival.

The concept of the artist is abstract to him, he does not use it. When asked what he is doing he says he is looking for the most fun way to survive.

“Because I grew up in an environment where we didn’t speak, poetry and writing helped me put my thoughts on paper and it made me understand who I am. I grew up with “travellers”, not with artists, whenever there is something of unknown origin inside us that leads us”.

I ask him how, when he has no such images, has not studied or seen other houses, he composes and makes tasteful houses and objects.

He shrugs his shoulders, he honestly doesn’t know how to tell me, except that he used to capture materials from a young age and they created a feeling for him. He steps on this feeling when he does interiors.

“Looking back, I would say that what I finally knew how to do, without having been taught, was to create atmosphere. This was probably also the feature of some Airbnbs I made in the beginning and everyone told me how much they liked them. That’s when I realized something was going on. I was lucky, I think. Nobody showed me the way, nobody told me how to do it. First with collages, then with poetry, I worked instinctively. The same in the interior. I created without a filter and finally, out of freedom, I came up with something.

When I saw the result, I thought that I liked the process, I liked the way I concentrated, I liked to finally see ten things made by my hands in the room.”

He builds a couple of friends’ and clients’ houses that they liked – that’s when he said “here we are”. He also has a first solo exhibition at Barrett with the collages, so he started to find his way. Little by little and word of mouth he was invited to build houses.

“I didn’t design professionally, I didn’t know how to work with models, I did everything improvisationally. I had to do all this seriously. So I went into the workshop and said to work on the furniture. Because it was something tangible that would allow me to clearly show my aesthetic. Then I also started a series with the first design chairs. I liked them, I continued with lamps, but I was thinking at the same time who will buy a chair for three hundred euros. Fortunately, a friend, on top of dozens of concerns, came and gave the answer: “you belong to collective design”. I looked it up, the term was there, and I was freed. It may sound crazy, but one word can change everything. So I started to devote myself to it. I taught myself a design program, I sat at the pc for hours. I spent a period of time locked at home, studying, meditating, and then writing or drawing, and that’s when I got, so to speak, the supersession, and it all worked out right. Now I knew I had found it. All my life something always told me “it’s not this”, and when it came I knew it was exactly that! I had found the way, I had found the ideas and now I knew how to show them. I had left the random, “a chair turned out nice for me” thing. The design helped me, I then started to make it known and that’s how the collaborations with architectural offices came. Another wanted lamps, another a collection of marbles. I always love the interior and I do it selectively. I have worked with many materials and objects, but in the end I like furniture because it gives me something more complete.”

His dream is to own a nice motorhome and take the road trips he loves so much.

Nice, guys, Harry! Leaving, it leaves me with the feeling that happy endings happen in life after all.