Meet Pinkys, The LA Iron And Steel Brand Modernizing American Homes
By Paul Jebara, Former Contributer
Before he was bending iron in a Los Angeles backyard, Vic Der-Sarkissian was a jazz drummer in Isfahan, Iran’s historic artistic capital, playing the most improvisational music ever invented in a city that has been making art for a thousand years. After the Revolution forced the family out, he carried both inheritances to California—the immigrant’s necessary trade and the artist’s necessary patience. “Vic sought to maintain the values and traditions he cherished, so our family fled to Los Angeles. A universal haven for artists and creative spirits,” his son Dion Der says now. “Initially, our father was crafting expressionistic ironworks in our backyard. He imbued each piece with the same passion he poured into his drumming. As we say, once an artist, always an artist.”
The doors that started in that backyard in 1978 became PINKYS Iron Doors, the Vernon, California manufacturer that brothers Dion and Arin Der took over and rebuilt in 2014. Walk into any AD-100-published Spanish revival in Hancock Park or new build in Brentwood today and the same detail repeats: a black steel-framed door, gridded, with sightlines slim enough that the wall seems to dissolve at the threshold. PINKYS specifications appear throughout Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s Architectural Digest renovation tour of their 1925 Hancock Park Tudor and their 8,500-square-foot 1928 Spanish Colonial. Los Angeles interior designer Oliver M. Furth used the Air Dutch in his own residence. The Core Collection lookbook’s beam-vaulted Spanish bedroom—the one anchoring the catalog—is Berkus and Brent’s project.
The category they came to has its own history, and the doors are mostly the same doors. Half a century before PINKYS, these were called Crittalls, after the Essex manufacturer that began rolling hot steel sections in 1884 and went on to glaze the Bauhaus’s adjacent Törten housing, the Boots factory in Beeston, and the De La Warr Pavilion. Pierre Koenig used them at the Stahl House in 1959. Esther McCoy titled her chapter on the Case Study program “Steel Takes Over.” Then American houses moved on—to vinyl, to aluminum, to anything that could pass an energy code—and steel windows vanished from the residential market for forty years. The doors that have come back are the same doors, more or less, which is the more interesting story. PINKYS is one of the companies bringing them back—reengineered for contemporary living, with slimmer profiles, larger glass, and more light and view than the originals could deliver. The contribution to the category is additive, not nostalgic.
The DNA Door, perhaps the most editorial piece in the catalog, is named for Dion and Arin. Its laser-cut steel screen redraws the geometric mosaic vocabulary that PINKYS’ own materials describe as drawn from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern lattice traditions—the cultural inheritance the Der family carried with them from Iran. It is the only product in the line that names the inheritance aloud. The rest of the line carries it in how the company operates. “Our ethos is that each door and window crafted by PINKYS is a view. A frame. A connection to the natural world outside,” Dion says. “Our family motto is to ‘Enjoy the View.’”
“Our end-user customers understand the benefits of our wide-ranging in-stock inventory and robust, industry-leading e-commerce site, while our architects and interior design trade clientele understand and appreciates the high-grade materiality of our steel from Jansen and Ottostumm metals, which are steps above what is prevalent across the market.” The development process is run, in his words, “in the spirit of crafting a sports car”—every architectural element subjected to “rigorous testing for energy and exposure to the elements.”
The catalog runs across two tiers. The Core Collection covers the workhorses—the Air series, the Bi-Fold, the Getty sliding system, plus the interior, pantry, and wine-cellar applications that round out the rest of the home's specification. Black-framed, gridded, equally legible in a 1928 Spanish revival in Hancock Park or a glass-and-steel new build in Brentwood. The California Collection is newer and bolder—Sunset Pink, Angeles Green, Palm Desert Sand, Montecito Mint—a palette pulled from the desert-to-coast color stories that have run through every shelter magazine since Commune Design started painting Yucca Valley pink. Most steel-door buyers still want black. PINKYS is making the case that some of them want a sage-green arched entry that nods to a Cycladic chapel before it nods to a Manhattan loft. Black Badge, Rhino, Portella’s WEST|DERA, and the legacy fabricators like Glenview Doors out of Chicago all sell black steel. PINKYS is the only one that has put real product development behind color.
What the Der brothers want a designer to know when they are choosing between PINKYS and the field is that the work is what it appears to be. “Beware of the rise of AI imagery,” Dion warns. “We are seeing so many AI generated products out there, from companies that are all smoke and mirrors. You may be seeing a product image with refined design and slim details, but the final product may be completely something else.” The PINKYS counter-argument is structural rather than rhetorical. “At PINKYS, we are a vertical company,” Dion says. “We design, we fabricate, we warehouse and distribute. We are a real family, dedicated to real products, working with real people.” That vertical integration is also why a designer like Brent uses the product across multiple projects rather than once. PINKYS runs its own delivery fleet—the pink Mercedes Sprinters that are now an unofficial design-world flag in Los Angeles—and its own installer network, both calibrated to the rhythm of the residential trade rather than the commodity construction calendar.
So it’s fitting that Brent designed the 4,600-square-foot showroom as a gallery—sculptural pendants against linear architecture, ochres and forest greens against the warehouse’s exposed concrete, a 1970s motorcycle behind a glass case. The location is not incidental. Vernon, five-square miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, was incorporated in 1905 as the first exclusively industrial city in the United States, deliberately built around three converging rail lines so factories could ship from a single zip code. Vernon Kilns made dinnerware here from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Studebaker assembled cars here. Farmer John painted its murals on the walls. PINKYS sits inside that fabrication lineage rather than alongside it—a steel-door company in a steel-manufacturing city. The showroom is making the case that this is where American craft happens now, and the gallery opens directly onto the working warehouse through PINKYS’ own products, palletized stacks visible through the glass, unconcerned with anyone watching. The product is the membrane between the two.
What Dion and Arin Der have built that the new entrants haven't is the relationship infrastructure. PINKYS' moat isn't only the manufacturing partnerships, important as they are. It's everything those partnerships don't replace: the relationships earned one project at a time across more than a decade, the install network calibrated to the residential design trade, and the family inheritance traced from a backyard in Los Angeles to a flagship in Vernon. The road ahead is more of the same work.
“We continue to innovate, with a focus on more efficient products that meet the ever-evolving, new energy regulations,” Dion says. “As we all must be proactively adaptive to the needs of the future today.” Forty-eight years in, the doors are still the doors. The freedom and openness of Los Angeles that first attracted Vic Der-Sarkissian—the city that took an Iranian jazz drummer and let him become an American ironworker—is, as Dion puts it, “still echoed in every door and window that we make.”
