Louis MV. Craft and Design Cooperation

Wooden Furniture Collection

Anthropo: Artisans. Familiar business / Context: Furniture Market. Crafts and Design. / Location: Toledo, Spain

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The Castilla y La Mancha Community (Spain) through the Spanish Foundation for the Crafts Innovation, launched a contest platform called D.Artes III with the aim of reinforce the collaboration between regional artisans and designers in order to give to regional artisan network new innovative inputs and tools for entrepreneurship.

More than 30 couples of designers and artisans were formed. The participating craftsman were ones with high experience in several techniques and materials, such as stone, fabrics, leather, wax, wood, marble, forging, glass among others.

Challenge: The challenge was to help a family business of wood craftmen called Muebles Guerrero Peces (MGP) to create a new collection of furniture using the wood and the manufacturing process already used by them.

Finding: The warehouse seemed more to an industrial factory than a simple craft workshop. Their business model did not fit with a crafts one. With the last generation machinery, Muebles Guerrero Peces were able to make any kind of wooden furniture, except the final inked and varnish finishing.

Once understood the maker skills and the profiles of each operator, some of then more technician than craftsman, and also the capabilities and techniques available at the «Workshop» we started to cross ideas about design, innovation and possible market. We worked and defined a briefing together.

MGP wanted a new collection with their own stamp. Usually they received commissions from sellers in Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe but that models were already designed and defined by them, blowing off any possibility to develop their own collection.

Our collaboration was centered in understanding our cooperation capacity, as designers, producers and craftsmen, in order to reach the MGP autonomy making the furnitures by themselves and go into the local and international market with an own product.

Solution: The result was the Louis MV collection which was composed of a sideboard, a showcase, a chest of drawer, a coffee table and a dining table.

The name comes from a reinterpretation of the Louis XV style furniture, simplifying its morphology and making a shape synthesis work and giving a more geometrical volume with straight lines instead of ornamented surfaces and edges. The «M» was an essential and common shape in all pieces, that was included in the name of the collection playing with the inspirational name of the style Louis XV.

Materials and processes: Initially the project did not determine any specific finishing. The design were proposed as with a plain natural wood, letting to MGP the freedom to choose a kind of wood and final finishing depending on the client, season collection or commission. However, the collection was presented in the Madrid Furniture Fair with a mahogany and cedar wood duotone finish.

The 3D modeling was done in Rhinoceros. Rendering with Flamingo

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