HEWI 111 Lever Handle

The HEWI 111 is a lever door handle moulded in glossy polyamide around a steel core. Its grip is a round bar, 20 millimetres thick, which leaves the rose at a right angle, runs parallel to the door and turns back towards it at the tip in a soft curve, so that the whole lever forms a squared U. The surface comes from the mould, not from polishing, and is pleasant in the hand and easy to clean.

The handle was developed in 1969 by Rudolf Wilke, son of the founder of HEWI, a firm at Arolsen in northern Hesse that had moulded Bakelite since the 1930s and adopted polyamide for door furniture in 1957. Wilke worked on it with architects. German Wikipedia credits the 111 with making the company known internationally, and it became the starting point for System 111, a family of matching coat hooks, handrails and balustrades.

The design is reduced in the manner of the Bauhaus door handle that preceded it, but where Gropius's handle of 1922 was a bent square bar ending in a cylindrical grip, Wilke's was a single rounded loop in colour. Architonic wrote in 2019 that it brought colour to the door for the first time. It was copied many times, and HEWI now embosses its name, with a number giving the diameter, on the end of the lever that faces the door, where the fingers can feel it but the eye does not see it.

More than half a century on, the handle is still made at Bad Arolsen, in a palette of around fifteen colours from pure white to black, and a matt edition was added for its fiftieth anniversary. HEWI says that almost everyone will have held one at some point. It is a modest object, priced as door furniture rather than design, and it is still sold in its first form by the firm that first made it.