Barber Osgerby and Kasthall: Letting the Loom Lead Text by Natalia Muntean Atlas and Bon Bon, the first collaboration between London-based Barber & Osgerby and Swedish carpet manufacturer Kasthall, were born directly from the conditions of the industrial loom. Working closely with Kasthall’s team in Kinna, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby spent time on the factory floor, immersing themselves in the rhythm and constraints of the mill before a single design decision was made. Rather than imposing a fixed aesthetic, they allowed the tools, techniques and archive of a 135-year-old company to shape the direction of their work, arriving, through experimentation and some sixty prototypes, at two collections that are as different from each other as they are from anything Kasthall has produced before. Natalia Muntean spoke with Edward Barber. Natalia Muntean: A lot of the collaboration with Kasthall was about listening and understanding their process. Was there something that surprised you, or maybe a limitation that inspired you when you were working with their industrial loom, something that changed the process, or made you rethink certain things?Edward Barber: I’d never done woven carpets before, so it was a completely new experience for me. And with every project I do, before designing anything, I always like to go and see where the objects are made and how they’re made, and talk to the people who make them, especially if it’s a craft project. And in a way, whilst this is industrial, for me this is also very much a craft project.So I spent a few days at the factory in Kinna to understand the process. They explained how the loom works. The basics are incredibly simple: you have the warp, and then you weave in between it, but when it comes to creating different patterns and techniques, it suddenly becomes much more complicated. They also have an extensive archive, so I spent some time going through it, mainly to see the range of colours they offer. A lot of it is very decorative and floral, which wasn’t what we were doing. The thing about archives is that they’re useful to a certain extent, but if you get too deep into them, you get lost, and they influence you too much. It’s good to get an idea and then close the door. After that, we started putting some experiments together. It was a back-and-forth process of them making samples, sending them to me, me changing the size of the weave or the colours, or asking more questions. When you come to something completely new, you have no preconceived ideas about what’s possible and what isn’t, so you ask what might seem like stupid questions. And sometimes they say, that’s interesting, we hadn’t thought of doing that before. They’re so nice to work with, such amazing people. We had a great dialogue, and it was really just a question of samples, changing them, more samples, until eventually we got to three different designs, three different patterns. They’re very simple, just straightforward woven carpets, but they’re really beautiful. I’m very, very pleased with them.NM: When you decided to work together, you didn’t have a preconceived plan as such; you went to Kinna, got to know their process, and that’s how the ideas started?EB: I’d seen Kasthall carpets over the years. I was aware of the company, and I’d seen various designs, but I didn’t think, this is what we need to do. It was really looking at some of the techniques they’d used in the past and saying, well, what about if we do this, but change this aspect of it? Can we make this bigger or smaller? What if we add two different coloured threads instead of using a single colour? Things like that, just asking questions, really. NM: Tell me about the two collections, Atlas and Bon Bon. How did you come up with the names, and what distinguishes one from the other?EB: Bon Bon is much stronger, more graphic in terms of its colourways. We use colour a lot in the studio, in a way that’s quite experimental, quite strong. With Bon Bon, we really went for it and tried to mix three colours on each carpet to create one finished colour. So the pattern is quite small, from a distance it might look like the carpet is one colour, but as you get closer, you can clearly see three different colours working together. It felt like a jar of sweets. And the names all reflect edible things. You’ve got Liquorice, Lemon, Toffee, Berry, Rhubarb, and Damson. They’re more playful, possibly even for a younger market. Atlas is a very chunky weave, so you get quite a thick carpet. And what we’ve done is mix two or three colours, on one we’ve got four, and it comes across quite randomly. So each carpet will look different because the threads moving across don’t go evenly every time. Sometimes you have a green thread on top and sometimes an orange thread, so you get this nice variation of tone and colour. I would call this a more organic, natural-looking carpet, and the colours reflect that. We called it Atlas because these colours, when woven, were quite reminiscent of older Moroccan carpets, with natural dyes for the threads. The Atlas Mountains are in Morocco, and when you look at the design, you see triangular shapes that resemble a mountain range. So we thought, Atlas. The two are completely different directions. NM: The intriguing thing about Atlas is that when you look closely, you can very clearly see the warp. Why was it important to leave it exposed, and how does it change how the rug feels?EB: Whenever we design anything, we always try to find a different way, or a new way to do something. With carpets, that’s pretty difficult – they’ve been around for thousands of years. But it’s a little unusual to be able to see the warp exposed the way it is. After some of the experiments, I was
