A Radiance All Their Own

Returning to the Netherlands, he bent metal rods into life-size animal sculptures, then draped them in skins and presented them as his graduate project at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In the group were a red deer, a ram and an arctic fox, and every one of them was a radiator.

Mr. van Leeuwen is the extreme designer who finds poetry in home heating devices. His Domestic Animals radiators, which he sells in an electric version for about $7,700 to $11,600 (not including shipping), recall the days when a hearth was the focal point of a home and livestock were welcome in the family huddle. The skins are stuffed with wheat kernels, effective in retaining warmth, and can be lifted from their armatures and wrapped around one’s shoulders.

But Mr. van Leeuwen is not alone among Europeans in reimagining the radiator as sculpture. His Continental peers have designed dozens of conversation starters, radiators that resemble a forest grove, a paper clip, a garden hose that uncoils and snakes around a room, and even a wall-hung homage to an artistic masterpiece. Hotech, an Italian radiator company, has a collection with names like Chagall and Fabergé. Its David model is a beefy male torso.

In this country, we are less fanciful with our heating apparatuses. The typical American radiator is an inconspicuous strip that runs along the baseboard or a corrugated rectangle that hugs the wall. If you live in a prewar big-city apartment building, you may be tyrannized by a steam-heated cast-iron radiator that sounds like a sociopathic amateur percussionist and feels like the forehead of Satan.

Why are American radiators so uncool?

Let’s start with the fact that, as countries go, the United States is not exactly radiator-friendly. Richard Trethewey, the heating and plumbing expert for the television show “This Old House,” said that whereas 99 percent of European homes are heated with hot water (otherwise known as wet or hydronic systems), from 6 to 11 percent of American homes have them, “depending on who you read.”

Instead, the vast majority of Americans heat their homes with warm air circulated through ducts and blown out of wall registers. Because the same forced-air system can also circulate cool air, it is the top choice here. (Europeans are less hung up on cold comforts like ice in their drinks and air-conditioning.)

And a small radiator market means there is a lack of incentive for manufacturers to produce and distribute avant-garde models.

Another obstacle to a wider choice of radiators is Americans’ hunger for surface area.

The European designers of decorative radiators have a big canvas to play with by necessity, because many of these devices run at the lowest possible hot-water temperature, to save energy. A number of European countries have mandated that no heating system can operate at higher than 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit). Which means a radiator’s dimensions must be large enough to generate sufficient heat.

If you live in a Victorian mansion in New England, you may be open to a hunk of metal, like a classic upright cast-iron radiator or even a contemporary art-style one that appropriates a wall, said Holly Cratsley, the principal of Nashawtuc Architects, in Concord, Mass. But as Americans reduce the size of their homes, they imitate Europeans only insofar as they seek out smaller appliances. That goes double for those who live in apartments.

So even if the radiator is an elegant woven grid of steel (like Stefano Giovannoni’s Trame model for the Italian company Tubes) or a handsome oak or walnut-veneered rectangular slab (like Phil Ward’s Woody model for the British company Eskimo), most of us are unwilling to commit to the colonization of wall space. “The push for my clients is more to liberate the walls rather than to add to the walls,” Ms. Cratsley said.