INTERWOVEN: THE STORIES BEHIND THE WEAVE
“Everything in our world of design and craft is interconnected; this exhibition is an invitation to experience the richness of that”
At the Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition at our Porto gallery, diverse stories are interconnected; weaving traditions from across Portugal come together in a shared story of heritage craft, creativity, and innovation.
Five years ago, with the beginnings of our in-house design studio De La Espada Atelier, came the thoughtful integration of artisanal craft into our products; diverse disciplines complementing our woodworking and upholstery. Under the guidance of De La Espada co-founders Luis De Oliveira and Fatima De La Espada, Simon Kämpfer, head of creative design at De La Espada Atelier, began coordinating partnerships with artisans across Portugal, with a particular focus on weaving. The Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition was designed by Simon to tell the stories of these partnerships through raw materials, film, images, and final products. It captures manual weaving traditions in junco (soft rush), wool, flax, and more, with products born of our partnerships with Fabricaal, Flores Textile Studio, Isabelle Ormieres, Catarina Riccabona, and Toino Abel. Here, Simon walks us through the exhibition, highlighting some of the stories behind the collaborations.
“Everything in our world of design and craft is interconnected; this exhibition is an invitation to experience the richness of that,” says Simon.
MANTAS ALENTEJANAS
Mantas alentejanas are a common sight in Portuguese homes; these merino wool blankets with over a century of history are an integral part of the design and craft culture of the country. For the past five years, De La Espada has brought these blankets into select products as upholstery, working in collaboration with Monsaraz-based producer Fabricaal. At the Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition, we launched our most extensive collaboration to date: an upholstery collection, Manta Lido, offered in eight colourways for select seating including Elysia and Sela Lounge Chairs by Luca Nichetto, and Twenty-Five Lounge, Bergere, and Ottoman by De La Espada Atelier. Raw spun wool threads and textile samples were displayed alongside final products, while a film by Building Pictures provided a window into the manual weaving process.
“Visiting Fabricaal is a bit like stepping back in time because the looms are the same ones used in the mantas’ earliest creation; everything is 100% manually operated. Listening to the sounds of the looms and seeing the shuttle flying back and forth – you can almost picture how that workshop was 50 or 100 years ago,” says Simon.
This dedication to the historic weaving techniques meets the creative energy of the Fabricaal owners who continue to thoughtfully evolve with new product applications, colours, and collaborations.
Speaking about the new Manta Lido collection, Simon shares:
“This particular fabric is based on an iconic blanket from the Fabricaal collection called Lido. We took the original Fabricaal Lido blanket and made a new interpretation for each chair. The pattern includes solid blocks, stripes and dotted lines; we took these design elements and applied them to each chair in a different way. For example, on the Twenty-Five Lounge Armchair, the design has been adapted to fit where the armrest is; it also takes into account wear and tear so where you sit it’s a solid colour, preferably a darker colour. Each chair has a specific pattern made for that product.
We developed eight colourways; some of them are the classic Fabricaal colours. Black and white, brown and white — these are kind of the core colours, and over the years modern colours were introduced. The colourways we chose include both muted and strong options like the green and reddish colour. I personally love the white and off-white colour combination which creates a much more subtle effect.
Fabricaal weaves on completely hand powered looms and they have two separate set ups of the looms: one with a regular warp and one with an irregular warp which we used in order to get these more dynamic stripe patterns rather than each line being exactly the same width.”
JUNCO
Junco (soft rush) is a grass that grows wild in Portugal, and has long been used to weave baskets. It was a natural choice for De La Espada, a local material with inherent beauty and numerous possibilities for complementing our woodwork.
“For the Twenty-Five Bed, we originally had the idea to create a wicker headboard, and the partner we approached imported the wicker; we looked around their workshop and in one corner was a junco basket, which is very common in Portugal, used for picnic baskets. And we thought, ‘Can we work with that?’ because it’s a native material, which is really important,” says Simon.
When developing the junco headboard, our in-house design team consciously included detailing that showcases the character of the material and its craft process. The Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition highlights this, displaying bundles of junco in its raw, dried state next to the completed bed and a second headboard hung on the wall revealing the back side.
“Normally the backside of the bed is against the wall so we wanted to show the beauty of the material that goes into making this piece. Rather than using a mat that is then applied like a fabric, the timber frame of the headboard acts as a loom which is then threaded in a delicate detail through the side with a Danish paper cord. Junco is then woven through this ‘loom’.
In the raw junco bundles, you can see that the grass itself, the usable length, is actually quite short, or is much shorter than the length of the headboard, and that’s why we end up having all these cut ends at the back. This is really part of the beauty of the design; it shows all the hand work that goes into making this piece, every single strand woven and then cut back. It tells so much about the story of this material,” says Simon.
Junco is also used on the Twenty-Five Bedside Chest designed to accompany the bed. These include side panels in woven junco, crafted at the Toino Abel workshop in the village of Castanheira, where artisans specialise in generations-old basketweaving techniques.
“I was very impressed by the Toino Abel workshop; they are basically crafting baskets similar to other makers, using hand looms and traditional methods, but in an updated and more contemporary way. The way they add design to the craft brings it forward, elevating the humble traditional baskets with great attention to detail,” says Simon.
“The Twenty-Five Bedside Chest bears a similarity to their baskets in a sense: the baskets are made out of panels which are then stitched together into a three-dimensional box shape; we essentially took one of those panels and applied it to each side of the bedside table. It’s a very different approach than the weaving of the bed; the panels are made on a loom, as opposed to the headboard which is woven directly on the frame,” he continues.
WOVEN TIMBER
Further drawing from local sources, Simon was inspired by the woven baskets used in salt production in Aveiro. He reinterpreted the baskets' construction in woven timber panels for the Arts & Crafts cabinet.
Simon explains:
“A lot of the Twenty-Five collection and other products designed by De La Espada Atelier were looking at local references. So when we worked on the Arts & Crafts Cabinet, which takes references from mainly the British Arts & Crafts movement, we created a standard woven timber option for the sliding panels.
These panels were inspired by the traditional split timber baskets used in the salinas salt production in Aveiro, local to our workshop.
I bought some of these baskets almost 10 years ago to style a photoshoot we did, kept them, and then the inspiration came back. We created this woven panel for the Arts & Crafts Cabinet which is made from solid timber which gets sliced down, sanded down to the exact right thickness — just thick enough to give us a three dimensional pattern but not too thick to crack and not too thin to look too flat. That kind of sweet spot of being able to weave with it as well as kind of a practical point.”
ARTISANAL LINEN
The sliding panels for the Arts & Crafts Cabinet are also available in a special linen textile from Flores Textile Studio, an interior design studio and textile showroom that combines contemporary design with traditional Portuguese handcraft.
“Flores had this almost cave-like studio in the centre of Lisbon and it just had a special atmosphere as you walked in — it really felt like you walked into their space and their vision. A lot of very tactile — lots of textures, fabrics, and materials,” says Simon.
The textile we use is made using an entirely artisanal process, from fiber cultivation and harvesting to spinning, weaving, and hand dyeing.
At Interwoven | Entrelaçado, new colourways of the textile launched, hand-dyed by Isabelle Ormieres. It is now offered in five colourway options, including Green, Ochre, Indigo, Madder Red and Natural White, as if drawn from a Mondrian painting.
TEXTILE ART
One final panel option for the Arts & Crafts Cabinet is single edition textile art by London-based textile artist Catarina Riccabona, whose work reflects shared values.
Catarina explains:
“I love that such emphasis is on materials and on craftsmanship, I just feel that’s such a natural alignment between De La Espada and myself. And it’s good to have a bit of a brief but within that I always feel I’m given an enormous amount of freedom of creative expression and to work spontaneously. I think that requires a lot of trust on De La Espada’s side and I really appreciate it — It’s fun to work like that.”
Classically trained as a weaver, and with a BA in textile design from London’s Central St Martins, Catarina’s approach combines traditional hand weaving techniques with contemporary artistry. Her yarns are eco-friendly, including linen, hemp, undyed or plant-dyed wools, recycled yarns and “waste warps”, the latter adding greater texture and punctuation to her textiles.
Two Arts & Crafts Cabinets by De La Espada Atelier feature single-edition textile art Catarina created specially for them. Her designs drew from the natural colours of the Danish oiled walnut cabinets and the grid pattern; textiles with a visual rhythm through alignment and contrast, playing with proportion, colour, and texture.
When designing the Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition, Simon sought to include not only Catarina’s work for the cabinets, but to commission a wall hanging for the exhibition.
Catarina took a thoughtful approach and, equipped with her deft skill and creativity, encapsulated the soul and vision of the exhibition into a single work of art, a diptych entitled At the Core.
Catarina explains:
“I discussed with Simon, he shared with me roughly what he had planned, what other work of mine would already be there; I knew roughly the colours, and these fantastic granite walls. I decided the colours would be quite natural. I also wanted to have a theme and I used this opportunity to work on an idea that I had on my mind for a while now.
And the idea that I was wanting to visualise is actually a really fundamental life question. It’s to do with the concept of non-duality. Non-duality refers to the interconnectedness, the oneness of everything and everyone that exists.
And I thought there is something really intriguing with weave that connects, because whenever you weave by hand, and you create something from scratch, you automatically have something with two sides: a front and a back. So I wanted to be able to see those two sides, instantly, in one moment, rather than having to turn it. So I decided to weave the same panel twice. They are slightly different because of the handwoven nature of the process, but I followed very strictly the same sequence of the yarns and the colours and the pattern configuration of the blocks. And then once they’re up on the wall, you could say, ‘Well, it’s two panels, they are separate, they look different’ but then I ask, ‘Is this their true nature?’ Because I could argue, at the core, they are the same idea. So basically I’m just exploring these questions of ‘Is the separation a perceived one, maybe? Or is it real?’ ”
At our Porto gallery, dedicated to contemporary craft, Interwoven | Entrelaçado celebrates diverse craft disciplines as well as what unites them. Creativity, collaboration and thoughtful innovation rooted in wisdom earned over generations.
The exhibition remains open until August 7.
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Interwoven | Entrelaçado exhibition
Photography by Yuki Sugiura
