Nani Marquina Wellbeing

Founded by designer and entrepreneur Nani Marquina, a pioneering Barcelona-based contemporary rug company called nanimarquina continues to explore combinations of the old and the new in its designs — an attribute that sets the brand apart as a leader in the textiles industry.

Modern style meets traditional craftsmanship in the graphic and richly colorful rugs that populate nanimarquina’s showrooms. A family-run business, nanimarquina creates timeless, long-lasting rugs and carpets that bring alluring textures and pops of color into contemporary spaces while paying homage to the ancient traditions associated with carpet-making. 

In 1961, Spanish industrial designer Rafael Marquina won the FAD Award for his design of an oil cruet. Inspired by her father’s creativity, Nani Marquina studied industrial design at the Escola Massana before pursuing a career in interior design. She briefly worked with an architecture studio in the 1970s and opened her own interior decorating business. Marquina soon discovered that the market for furnishings didn’t exactly offer a wealth of modernist rugs to complement contemporary interiors, so Nani began designing her own textiles and founded her eponymous brand In 1987.

Bringing in leading Spanish designers including Pere “Peret” Torrent, Sybilla and Javier Mariscal, nanimarquina quickly became a leader in textile design, garnering praise in Europe as well as the United States.

Marquina traveled to India, Nepal and Pakistan to learn about their rug-making traditions. Inspired by the hard work and skill demonstrated by traditional weavers — and moved by how fundamental rug-making is to the cultural history of these parts of the world — Marquina decided to move the company in a new direction. In 1994, nanimarquina relocated its production facilities to India to work with the region’s talented artisans (today, the manufacturer produces rugs in Nepal, Pakistan and India). 

Maria Piera Marquina, Nani’s daughter, now heads the company as CEO, helping nanimarquina continue to expand into the international market and maintain its prominent position as a purveyor of fine textiles worldwide. Over time, the manufacturer’s founder has partnered with Marcos Catalán to make poufs upholstered with kilims, and she collaborated with designer and Canary Islands native Elisa Padrón to create the Tres collection, a luxurious line of hand-loomed rugs that is inclusive of textiles intended for both indoor and outdoor spaces. Padrón continues to create rugs for nanimarquina and directs the company’s in-house design team, which includes award-winning designer Ariadna Miquel.

Nanimarquina is as dedicated to the communities that are home to the brand’s facilities as it is to producing quality textiles. The company endeavors to use rug-making to make the world a better place. In collaborating with the Care & Fair association, nanimarquina founded the Kala project, which directs a portion of their earnings to ensure education for their workers and their families. Nanimarquina also uses recycled materials such as bicycle tires in some of their designs and has incorporated the use of biodegradable, eco-friendly materials in the rug-making process. 

Nanimarquina’s dazzling designs have earned the company many accolades and international recognition. Their designs have received the Red Dot Award and the IWEC award, among others.

Authentic nanimarquina textiles have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Salone del Mobile and at the Council of Human Rights at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. On the company’s 25th anniversary, nanimarquina’s artisans created a giant patchwork rug as a public art installment in Barcelona. Nanimarquina’s carpets are available through the company’s hundreds of distributors worldwide, and the brand has partnered with the likes of Fendi, Harrods and Rolls Royce.

Find Nani Marquina rugs and carpets on 1stDibs. 

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.