All The Way To Paris × Wool carpet / HOTTA CARPET [Story1] Fresh Inspiration from Copenhagen

Getting to know each other’s creativity and skills. To have a dialogue with each other. And to create something new from there. This story describes the various processes behind the products born from TOKYO CRAFT ROOM. And we are starting our next project again.

The designer for the fourth project are All the Way to Paris (ATWTP). It is a graphic design studio based in Copenhagen, Denmark, founded by two women, Tania Vibe and Petra Olsson Gednt.  Their work is graphic-based and ranges from creating visual identities, exhibition and event graphics, and editorial design for books. Their work is impressive, with a unique color palette that is exquisitely balanced in beautiful graphics and witty drawings. The charm of their work lies in the playfulness and marginality that lurks within such perfection. Even within the two-dimensional world of graphic design, there is a depth to their work that makes you feel their handiwork, and they have the presence of an art piece. We asked the girls to create a “carpet” design. It seems to be a two-dimensional product that can make use of graphic design, but we have high hopes that ATWTP will be able to come up with a new idea for a carpet that goes beyond the two-dimensional world of graphic design.

“We are honoured to be working with our friend Teru (Teruhiro Yanagihara, Creative Director of TOKYO CRAFT ROOMJ) who has done a lot of great work for us. We are looking forward to bringing our designs to live alongside the great designers and makers of these products in TOKYO CRAFT ROOM. Every project is a new challenge, and I’m sure we’ll find new energy and inspiration in the context of TOKYO CRAFT ROOM.”

The company that we commissioned to develop the “carpet” designed by ATWTP is Hotta Carpet, a carpet manufacturer based in Izumi, Osaka, which has been in business since 1962. They are particular about using wool as a material, and have been involved in the interior design of a wide variety of products, including luxury hotels, boutiques, government facilities and residences, and their carpets are already used in the bedrooms of TOKYO CRAFT ROOM. In addition, the company is still manufacturing Wilton carpets using Wilton looms, a rare loom owned by only a few companies in Japan with about 20 units in operation, and the company continues to pursue the unique texture of textiles and superior quality in durability that can only be expressed with the skills of craftsmen. With its vision of “making carpets a part of Japanese culture”, Hotta Carpet Co. In addition to developing our own brand of Wilton carpets and other well-thought-out products for a variety of uses and situations, we are also working on a variety of other initiatives to convey the “pleasant lifestyle” of carpets, such as proposing the appeal of wool, a natural material that is excellent in humidity control and easy to care for, and the importance of living with carpets. The approach is sending out.

They have designed many products in the past, but this time we invited ATWTP to be our designer, and in the preliminary stages before they started talking with them, they started to think about what specifications would be appropriate and what new challenges they could take on, so we decided to create one of their own brands. The proposal to use “WOOLTILE” as a base was brought up.

Hotta Carpet’s wool tile is a DIY carpet that makes it easy for anyone to create a floor, a new brand created in 2019 to take advantage of the properties of the Akistyle loom, which was taken over by a company in the same business three years ago when it went out of business.One piece is 50cm x 50 and It is possible to enjoy creating a space easily without using tools, etc. by freely combining the colors and patterns of a 50 cm square carpet tile according to the location and purpose for which it is laid. Normally, carpet tiles are made in a long piece of fabric and then punched out in a mold, making it difficult to cut in a straight line, and it is assumed that the patterns are not connected. Following on from the Wilton carpet, Akistyle’s wool tiles are a new challenge for Hotta Carpets, and this is where the company’s participation in this project comes in. This is where TOKYO CRAFT ROOM’s project comes into play. 

“I wondered what we could achieve if we put the unique perspective of ATWTP, a designer from overseas, and the graphics born from their unique sensibility into these woolen tiles. I thought it would be a new challenge. And while we borrowed the designer’s new ideas, the product had to be a “Hotta Carpet”. I’d like to focus on the fun of putting wool tiles together like a puzzle and the technology of reproducing the intricate design of the Aki Style loom one piece at a time,” says Masaya Hotta, the third president of Hotta Carpet.

The combination of graphics and patterns born of wool tiles. The mood of this project is sure to be expressed by the various inspirations surrounding fashion, design, interior design, food, and nature…… while traveling back and forth between Japan and Denmark.  This is a collaboration between the design direction of ATWTP, the attention to material and the high level of technology of Hotta carpet, which cannot be achieved by simply putting graphics on a single carpet. The development of a completely new carpet has begun.

>>Continued in Story 2

All The Way To Paris

All the Way to Paris (ATWTP) started as a graphic design duo based in Copenhagen, founded by Tanja Vibe and Petra Olsson Gendt. They met at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where they both studied graphic design and soon after founded their own studio. From graphic identities, digital designs, illustrations, art and museum catalogues, exhibition graphics and books to rugs, fabrics, intriguing design objects and interiors － they work conceptually with visual communication in small and large scale. 

allthewaytoparis.com/

HOTTA CARPET

Hotta Carpet is a maker specialised in producing by wilton woven wool carpet. Founded in the 1962 in Izumi, Osaka, the company has been producing the product from home to hotel use, in addition to rug and DIY carpet. Through using one of the oldest ways of making carpets on machine-driven looms, Hotta is re-defining the culture of carpet in Japan as their long term vision. Their fine quality textured carpets are recognised by high end hotel, luxury brands, and government ministries.

hdc.co.jp/