Alan Heller, the manufacturer of elegant, often whimsical but always affordable housewares and furniture that married high design with prosaic plastic, died August 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

“Alan understood how good design could make your life more fun and more pleasurable,” said Suzanne Slesin, a longtime design writer and publisher and a former reporter for The New York Times. “He made plastic objects that had integrity and beauty — something you wanted to collect and show off — and were affordable. It was design for everyone.”

“Without guys like Alan,” Lester Gribetz, then-vice president of Bloomingdale’s, told the design writer Arlene Hirst in 1985, “this would be the dullest industry in the world.”