Colombo Construction Corp

Elena Colombo is a classically trained sculptor & architectural designer, who owns and operates Colombo Construction Corp, a design/build firm specializing in custom, site specific work: fire, water, and wind features, memorials, markers, and environmental sculpture; as well as product design and manufacturing. Colombo creates work that extends the realm of architecture further into the landscape by createing forms that are simple, elegant, modern as well as ancient, which address our primal need for the elements earth, fire, water and wind. Elena works in bronze, steel, stone, concrete and bone. Colombo is currently manufacturing a series of interior and exterior fire features, the first of which is the outdoor firebowls. The standard four to six-foot diameter bowls are fitted with a 150,000 or 300,000 BTU burner, a connection for propane or natural gas, and a manual pilot ignition system for safe and controlled ignition. “I am ever inspired by the elemental nature of fire, and the primal need we have for it. Fire serves both our need for beauty and our instinct to gather around a warm lighted place; it is a destination wherever it burns. For 600,000 years we have shared food, stories, and experiences around the fire; during the last hundred, we seem to have abandoned the hearth as the focus of community. I would like to restore the hearth as a ceremonial place and as a point of convergence.” Among Colombo’s early clients are hotelier Andre Balazs, who commissioned firebowls for the cocktail terrace at Sunset Beach, his Shelter Island hotel, for his private residence in New York, for the Raleigh and Standard Hotels in Miami Beach, and his new Standard Hotel in Manhattan. Firebowls have also been installed at The Lodge at Cordillera; Jonathan Adler’s Parker Palm Springs; The Pebble Beach Golf Resort, Marmol Radziner Prefab Prototype house in Desert Springs; the landmark Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood; Paul Hobbs Winery, Sebastopol; Press Restaurant, St. Clement Vineyards, Benzinger Vineyards and Alpha Omega Winery in Napa Valley; as well as with Lisa Marie Presley and Anne Rice. Colombo’s Firebowl has been nominated as ‘Best Outdoor Product’ by the 2004 Design and Decoration Awards, was the featured center piece in horticulturalist Jamie Durie’s gold medal winning garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show; and has recently been nationally certified by OMNI-TEST Laboratories Inc. Prior to opening her company, Colombo worked extensively in print and television media as a director of award winning television commercials and print campaigns for Proctor and Gamble, IBM, Kellogg’s, Spalding, Oil of Olay, Chevy, Mattel, Caterpillar, and Nintendo. After graduating from college, Elena began work at Broadcast Arts in model design and production on the set of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, learning storyboard production, animation, special effects rigging and art direction. She continued working in this design capacity for Woo Art International, MTV and VH1. Education: Elena graduated from Trinity College, Hartford CT in 1984 with a BA in both fine arts and art history, with a concentration in architectural design, sculpture and etching. While at Trinity, she spent a year abroad in Rome at the Caesar Barbieri Center to study sculpture, painting and the Italian Renaissance. Elena continued her education in the arts at the Museum School in Boston, Mass. "Fire Features are available world wide! Please contact Francis Hausler at [email protected]