Spain’s carpet designer Nanimarquina from Barcelona

2024-02-04 14:08:21

Enter Nani Marquina: The founder welcomes visitors to her company’s design studio with a beaming smile. She is wearing a black sweater and checked pants. She keeps pushing aside her medium-length gray hair, which falls over her face. The seventy-one-year-old walks resolutely through the room, grabs one of the samples lying around and points out special features in the fabric. She holds two balls of yarn next to each other and explains the differences between the smooth wool from New Zealand and the irregular wool from Afghanistan. There is a stack of carpets on the floor, prototypes of the upcoming innovations. They are not finished yet, Nani Marquina is obviously not satisfied yet. She repeatedly discusses details with members of the design team in Catalan while describing the designs in English. One carpet after the other is folded back, rolled up, black and white patterned, green, off-white examples.

Every year, the company and its around 40 employees bring several collections onto the market – their own designs, but also collaborations with designers and artists such as Ilse Crawford, Jaime Hayon, Cana Özgür and Mathias Hahn. Nani Marquina is a perfectionist. “This is important when you work with designers. They ask for another prototype and another prototype, I understand that,” she says and laughs. For example, the Frenchman Ronan Bouroullec, one of the stars of international design. Together with his brother Erwan and also on his own, he has already designed carpets for the company. “We understand what he wants, we speak the same language,” says the Catalan. She herself studied industrial design and discovered carpet as a medium at the end of the 1980s. The idea was the same as today: to give a traditional but also old-fashioned piece of furniture a contemporary form. “This idea was the driving force from the beginning,” she says. She started small, with three employees and what felt like the only woman in a world dominated by men. So she became part of the creative renewal of her hometown. She was there when Barcelona shook off the torpor of the Franco years and became one of the liveliest metropolises in Europe.