Making a home in Lisbon requires patience – but Portuguese manufacturing is worth the wait
You might have noticed that we’re in the middle of the fashion, art and design trade-fair season. Frieze Seoul has already wrapped; the London Design Festival concludes today; Milan Fashion Week comes to a close tomorrow; Paris’s turn on the runway is next, followed shortly after by Art Basel Paris in the newly renovated Grand Palais. One fair that didn’t make it onto many international schedules was a small Lisbon exhibition I stumbled upon late Friday afternoon – but I’m glad I did.
For the better part of six months I’ve been working on a renovation project atop a modern apartment block not far from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in the Portuguese capital. (Newsflash: the new Kengo Kuma addition officially opened last night and it’s a stunning intervention in the middle of the Gulbenkian’s dense parkscape.) It’s been somewhat slow going but this recent visit marked real progress and I got a proper sense of the volumes in the kitchen since the cupboards were pulled out, plus the possibilities for the terrace and how many people I could comfortably invite for a Christmas cocktail. With mom and Mats on hand with the tape measure and rolls of masking tape, we set about marking positions for beds and sofas, tables and carpets. At the start of this project we set ourselves the task of making the finished product a 100 per cent made on the Iberian Peninsula affair – with a few exceptions. For the kitchen we’re keeping things sleek and Swiss by going for V-Zug, and as it’s almost impossible to work on any residence without the ghosts of Josef Frank and Estrid Ercison looking down on design choices – there’ll also be a few moments of Svenskt Tenn here and there.
During this past weekend’s spin through Stockholm we had a few weak moments when we considered going Swedish for rugs, Finnish for beds and Danish for the terrace as we felt comfortable with many of the companies’ classic designs. While taping out where a pair of sofas should go we were definitely thinking Danish because little had caught our eye from Portuguese and Spanish makers; and having made a few enquiries with rug manufacturers in the north of Portugal, without much in the way of results, we were definitely considering Vandra or Kasthall from Sweden. I was on the verge of abandoning the 100 per cent Iberian-made straitjacket we’d created for ourselves when I noticed a small trade fair listing on rug brand Ferreira da Sá’s website – Homeing, 19 to 20 September, Pavilhão Carlos Lopes, open Friday till 20.00. I clicked on the link as I’d never heard of the fair and after reading the brief intro about its focus on design, the hospitality trade and Portuguese brands I was already prodding mom and Mats out of the pool, into sensible footwear for walking around an exhibition space and into a cab.
Thirty minutes later, with just over 90 minutes to walk Homeing’s halls, we got our badges and were assessing whether our made-in-Spain-and-Portugal parameters could be salvaged (by the way, the Lapa Palace is an absolute gem at this time of year). We hadn’t walked more than 15 metres when we were trodding over a lovely herringbone-weave rug in welcoming tones of caramel and dark brown. The sunny decorator responsible for the stand came up to see if we had any questions and I immediately asked about the chic fibres underfoot. “Is this one of your brands?” I asked. “Made in Portugal?” – “Not one of my brands,” she said. “I just designed this part of the exhibition but the rug is definitely Portuguese-made. The company is just over there, in the main hall.”
As interior trade fairs go, Homeing is positively tiny but it only took a trot down half an aisle before I could feel that giddy sense of light-headedness coming on. Beds, towels, blinds, sofas, tiles, lamps, rugs, more tiles and plenty of cork were all on offer and all mostly made in and around Porto. After a few chats with eager and informed brand owners I was further elated when told a custom bed might take a week and would be priced in the hundreds of euros. Ditto on the delivery time for the herringbone rug I spotted on arrival. When I spoke to the maker of the rug he said that he used to be the biggest manufacturer of sisal rugs in Europe but Ikea, his biggest customer, all but changed this when it opted to move manufacturing to China and elsewhere. “You simply can’t compete,” he said with a shrug. Or can you? In a moment when Europe and many others are worried about e-vehicle imports, perhaps it’s time for a fresh push to encourage made in Europe – not just to protect trade but to shore up skills and traditional manufacturing techniques. Brand Portugal (Spain too) has a huge opportunity to build on its evolved manufacturing base but it needs retail clients and consumers to be educated about the value of supporting local players and keeping looms and fingers busy. Portugal needs to step up and not only challenge the Swedes with a homegrown retail brand but also its neighbours up at Zara Home HQ in A Coruña.
