Limited Edition “Foco Rojo” by Ariel Rojo for Odabashian

Mexico City – Tenochtitlan.

Founded in 1325, it has been the capital of two empires and now a Class “A” world city and the center of a burgeoning creative movement that is taking the design world by storm.

Ariel Rojo’s “Foco Rojo” is the latest collaboration with Odabashian in developing limited edition hand made rugs. Mr Rojo uses this theme as it’s central statement.

“Mexico is in a state of red alert. But not in a negative sense. It is in a promising state that it is out of it’s comfort zone in order to grow creatively”. -Ariel Rojo.

This movement is clear in the latest developments in art, architecture and design in that city.

This limited edition of 10 pieces is available exclusively through Marion Friedmann Gallery in London. The rug was on display during the 2012 London Design Festival at DesignJunction and has received many accolades in several international publications such as COVER magazine.

It was also a finalist during the 2013 edition of the “Carpet Design Awards” at Domotex Global flooring show in Hannover, Germany in January 2013.

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Odabashian’s mission is to consistently promote emerging design in hand-made high-quality limited edition rugs for only the most discerning interiors across the globe. For more information, please contact us here.

Odabashian by CENTRO- 1st hand-made rug design workshop in Latin America. April 9-13, 2012

Centro, Mexico’s premier design, architecture and film school recently invited Odabashian to:  Odabashian by CENTRO, A  Rug Design Workshop for it’s Interior Architecture students.

The first of it’s kind in Latin America, the workshop consisted of a five-day, design and process- intensive class focusing on the history, manufacturing, materials and design of hand-made and hand knotted rugs that Odabashian has been manufacturing  for over 91 years and sold in Mexico, Boca Raton, Miami and the world.

The workshop was hosted by Beata Nowicka, Director of the Interior Architecture bachelor program. Each student developed a unique design using the information provided during the initial phase of the workshop. Then, on the final day, each design was presented to a panel of selected professiors from CENTRO, professionals, designers and artists. One of the designs was selected and will be manufactured in a high-density hand-tufted quality rug made of New Zealand wool and bamboo silk.

The winning design will be on display at CENTRO at an exclusive exhibit showcasing the workshop as well as the talent of the students involved.

Odabashian and CENTRO will collaborate in this workshop each year during the Spring semester as part of CENTRO’s mission to further enrich the quality and depth of the Interior Architecture bachelor program.

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Contact us to explore how Odabashian can put our experience to work for your creative design project.

Odabashian supplies rugs to cutting-edge Mexican Design Store – Pirwi

Alejandro Castro & Emiliano Godoy, two design visionaries who founded Pirwi in Mexico City, are at the forefront of the environmental sustainable design.

Odabashian is a proud rug supplying partner to Pirwi’s flagship store in Polanco, Mexico City.

From Dwell Magazine:

“Since its inception, Pirwi was thought as a manufacturing platform with a high care for the environment, reducing impacts on in-house manufacturing processes as well as materials sourcing and disposal. Furthermore, several design and manufacturing strategies have been implemented in order to better control our products’ environmental impact throughout their complete life cycle. We like to collaborate with designers, suppliers and clients that share our concern for the preservation of our planet.”

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To find out how Odabashian can manufacture an exclusive signature rug line for your design business, contact us here. 

Igloo Design – A hand-knotted rug resembling a peaceful oasis in your living room.

Igloo is a design studio led by long-time friends and veterans of Mexico’s graphic design world, Monica Peón and Griselda Ojeda.

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Igloo was invited to participate in the unprecedented project to design an original hand-knotted rug and to exhibit it at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City.

The Igloo team’s experience in this project was very evident in the results of their design. Monica has undergraduate experience at UAM and international exposure from Cranbrook, one of the most respected design and art schools in  Michigan. Griselda compliments this ability through her experience from Escuela Nacional de las Artes and her unflinching dedication to her studio.

Together they developed “Submarino”. This is a 100- line tibetan weave rug with spectacular use of color, texture and balance which clearly illustrates Igloo’s mastery of graphic design application to unconventional objects.

During the opening night, “Submarino” was one of the most popular pieces of the exhibit and Odabashian is certain will mark the first of many collaborations with the excellent Igloo team.

Contact us if you want to explore how Odabashian can develop and materialize your design on a

Benito Cabañas – Poster art knotted by hand in wool and silk!

For thousands of years hand-knotted rugs have been used as a graphical form of expression through the use of color, texture and material. In our age of interconnectedness and globalization, it is only logical to begin to assume that all forms of graphical expression can instigate personal reflection and introspection. Hand made rugs are not the exception!

Benito Cabañas, a renown poster and graphic artist from the exquisite colonial city of Puebla through his company Abracadabra, participated in Odabashian’s exhibit at the Franz Mayer Museum of decoriative and applied arts in Mexico City called “Tapetes – Anudando historias, enlazando ideas”.

Photo - F. Etulain

His contribution to the collection called “Libertad” (Freedom) is representative of his extraordinary career. In it he follows his exceptional ability to communicate powerful ideas with minimal graphical resources.

Renata Becerril, curator of the exhibit describes:

“For millenia, rugs have always expressed deep graphical symbolism as a secondary function of their intended design use as a surface covering. Geometrical patterns, natural motifs and colors express meanings in each of the geographical locations where the rugs are woven. In his piece, Benito uses contemporary language using the ancient medium”

Benito Cabañas inspects his rug for the first time at the Franz Mayer Museum on opening night.

Odabashian prides itself in promoting and collaborating not only emerging talent across different geographies, but also in applying the best quality to each project. Contact us to explore how we do this!

Paul Cremoux’s “Yuxtaposiciones” gets you thinking and keeps you pondering Sustainability

How does an object d’art transcend its material form into an abstract idea?

The capability of design is so fundamentally revolutionary in nature, that it has the implicit power to influence thoughts. These thoughts have the potential to become trends, and these trends to change our environment….literally.

With his background at UNAM (Mexico), Columbia University (USA) and EPAD (France), Paul uses his multicultural experience to attempt to make a strong statement on the environmental impact of all that we acquire. The design of his rug for the exhibit “Tapetes – Anudando historias, enlazando ideas” which was exhibited at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City in the Spring of 2011, is an exploration in environmental impact and sustainability.

The rug, “Yuxtaposiciones” has references to it’s impact:

Photo - F. Etulain

- The grey and off-white contrasting lines were designed in Mexico and represent a baseline to blur and confuse the eye into one monochromatic color base.

- The colored part of the design are the inscribed woven names of each of the weavers that participated in the actual hand weaving manufacturing process. Furthermore, the colors are selected from the remains of the wool used in the manufacturing process of other custom rugs for Odabashian. Thus, “Yuxtaposiciones” seeks to empower the actual weavers to be an active participant in the composition of the rug itself.

Furthermore, the rug installation is exhibited with a Google Maps detailed trajectory of the logistics that the raw materials, transformation and finished goods underwent throughout the entire process.

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And as a final and clear statement, Paul includes the calculation of the mass of CO2 released by the production of one of these rugs across the entire supply chain process.

Here is a short video of Paul discussing his rug (Spanish)

Contact us to see how we can use our 90-year experience to manufacture one-of-a-kind design rugs for your project.

Gonzalo Tassier’s “Tapete de Asfalto” – A Safe zone at home.

“I was born with a gift and I feel that my duty is to give it back to others.”

-Gonzalo Tassier 

Recipient of the prestigious Sir Misha Black medal awarded by London’s Royal College of Art in 2008 for extraordinary dedication to design education, Gonzalo Tassier embodies the humility and back-to-basics attitude that is the fundamental charisma sought by many designers across their entire careers.

Gonzalo’s piece, aptly named “Tapete de Asfalto” (Asphalt Carpet) is an exploration into how graphics evoke a very clear emotional response from users. The black wool background and the white silk lines are a representation of the lines on a crosswalk. Crosswalks, are a “safety zone” in a hostile pedestrian environment. A place where one feels safe when crossing the street. At home, around our living room, in our bedroom or in our den, we feel the same sense of security. Shelter is one of the most basic and primordial origins of human design.

Photo -F. Etulain

To see the entire collection of the exhibit at the Franz Mayer, click here.

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Ximena Perez Grobet- “Entrelineas”. Calligraphy, design and introspection

Ximena Perez Grobet is the only visual artist by profession of all the guest designers who participated at the exhibit, “Tapetes – Anudando historias, Enlazando ideas” at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City in April and May 2011.

Ximena’s long experience in editorial design and her fascination with the graphic representation of the written word is apparent in her proposal “Entrelineas” (Eng: “In-between lines”) which is an exquisite and visually stunning hand-knotted rug. Her piece is an introspection in the plasticity of the letters and their forms, not their meaning or the sound of their phonemes. Her translation from a writing medium to a hand-knotted one exaggerates the dimension of the hand-stroke of each character. It is at this large-scale that the aesthetic quality of the calligraphy is appreciated as a form of design: one that is perhaps lost, minimized or overlooked while reading, but generates new feelings and proposals at a large scale.

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This design is limited-edition and can be manufactured in several sizes. Contact us for details.

Joel Escalona’s talent explodes in pixels of color!

Joel Escalona is one of Mexico’s most promising industrial designers. Not one to shy away from bold and daring initiatives, Joel’s attitude towards the rug project was enthusiastic from the start!

Wallpaper* Magazine calls him: : “one of the top of the next wave of creative talent worldwide”.

Often featured at the ICFF and has participated in numerous design fairs such as Maison & Objet as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.

Renata Becerril, Curator of the exhibition at the Franz Mayer Museum, where Joel’s “Fragmentos” is included:

Familiar elements in non-conventional and unexpected uses promote reflection and observation of what surrounds us. When designing his rug, Joel Escalona alludes to venetian mosaics often used as a wall or surface covering and a graphical element of decor. In this particular case, the element is soft and covers the floor. This is a graphical compositions that reclaims the unity of mosaics in the form of discrete pixels….. 

"Fragmentos" - by Joel Escalona (F.Etulain)

Odabashian is currently developing other color and pixel variations with Mr. Escalona in order to offer a full-range of variants to this very successful design.

Contact us to see how we can help you develop your interior project.

“Damascus – A city, revisited” – a hand-woven perspective by Designer Manuel Alvarez Fuentes

Dimashq, or Damascus, The city of Jasmin. It is the second largest city in Syria. Estimated to have been first inhabited around 6300BC, it is likely the oldest continually inhabited city on planet Earth.

This city was Industrial designer Manuel Alvarez Fuentes’ inspiration for developing a design for the exhibit at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City called “Tapetes – Anudando Historias, Enlazando Ideas” that features 18 of Mexico’s top architects, industrial and graphic designers.

Born in Mexico City in 1948. He studied industrial design at the Universidad Iberoamericana and graduated in 1971. In 1975 he got his master’s degree in design from the Royal College of Art, in London, England. He was director of the design department of the Iberoamericana University from 1978 to 1982. Professor and professional of design in a number of fields: industrial, graphic and interiors. Since 1992 he is director of design for diCorp (Diseño Corporativo) in the Mexican colonial city of Queretaro.

Photo - F. Etulain

An excerp from curator Renata Becerril’s introduction to the piece:

…Manuel Alvarez transports an entire city into a room. In that act, he not only successfully connects interior with exterior, he makes any city relevant to Damascus. To step on [the rug] it, walk on it, lie on it, observe it gives the user  or inhabitant of that city scale and size. It is in that point, inside a room that is inside a city, that the observer remembers his/her position inside the whole ensemble. 

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Contact us to explore ways to utilize this 3000 year-old technique in the highest quality to move design thinking forward.