cc-tapis Slinkie Runner Rug by Patricia Urquiola

Spanish-born, Milan-based architect Patricia Urquiola doesn’t lack for commissions these days, and, unlike the work of many other high-concept architects, her projects tend to get constructed, envelope-pushing though they sometimes are. And when she’s not imagining covetable creations for contemporary furniture houses — including B&B Italia, Driade and Cassina, where she was named art director in 2015 — Urquiola makes headlines by designing some of the world’s most aesthetically ambitious hotels, such as 2016’s Il Sereno on Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy.

Born in Oviedo, in northern Spain, Urquiola grew up in a family that valued creativity. Everyone in the house, she says, talked and cared about design. She fondly remembers her mother going to London in the 1960s and ’70s and coming back home with a Mary Quant this, a David Hicks that. When it came time to go to university, Urquiola decided that her place was architecture school, first at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and then at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where she completed her design thesis — a felt carpet with a panel that connected to a home’s electricity source and telephone line so that you could plug, say, a table lamp and your phone into it — under the direction of legendary Italian industrial designer Achille Castiglioni.

Today, Urquiola has become a go-to when it comes to avant-garde product, hospitality and retail design, working with such blue-chip international furniture, fashion and hotel companies as Alessi, Baccarat, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kvadrat, Mandarin Oriental, Panerai, Rosenthal, W Hotels and Louis Vuitton, among many others. Her residential projects, meanwhile, though few and far between, stretch from such far-flung locations as Punta del Este, Uruguay, and Melbourne, Australia, to closer-to-home Udine, in northeastern Italy, where she designed the two-story, largely open-plan glass-and-cedar home of Patrizia Moroso, creative director of the family-owned design company that bears her last name.

Over the course of a long-term and highly productive collaboration spanning some 20 years, Urquiola has created dozens and dozens of Moroso-branded products. A chair from her 2001 Fjord line of seating, tables and poufs for the company sits in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Moroso debuted (love me) Tender, her modular sofa system upholstered in jersey, during Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in April of 2014.

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The cc-tapis rug company creates deep-piled, lustrous Himalayan wool rugs and carpets in a dizzying variety of modern designs, shapes and colors. Each intricate piece is hand-knotted in Nepal by expert Tibetan rug artists over several months. 

The cc-tapis tagline is “Born in France. Designed in Milan. Produced in Nepal.” Its founders — Fabrizio Cantoni and Nelcya Chamszadeh — met while studying hospitality management in Switzerland. While they pursued careers in the hotel industry, they ultimately decided on a change. Chamszadeh’s father owned a traditional Persian carpet shop in Strasbourg, Germany, and the idea for cc-tapis took shape. 

Their first shop opened in Strasbourg in 2001. They later relocated the company to Milan, Italy, in 2011. Cantoni enrolled in a master’s course in interior design and met fellow designer Daniele Lora. Lora became the couple’s business partner and the company’s creative director. Together, the three created the brand name; “cc” is the couple’s surname initials, and “tapis” is the French word for carpet.

At the company’s eponymous laboratory, the cc-tapis design lab, the trio’s love of experimentation allowed them to reach outside of the carpet-making world and promote the imaginations of designer Faye Toogood and architect Patricia Urquiola. Collaborations with designers Sabine Marcelis, Mae Engelgeer and Philippe Malouin also pushed the company into the interior design spotlight.

Today cc-tapis continues to partner with contemporary designers and draws on a broad base of expertise and creativity to make stunning rugs that are the embodiment of furniture as art.

On 1stDibs, find cc-tapis rugs and carpets, wall decorations and more.