Nani Marquina Runner

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. Over the years, the founder has collaborated with designer and Canary Islands native Elisa Padrón on the company’s award-winning Tres collection. 

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. 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. The manufacturer’s founder has partnered with Marcos Catalán to make poufs upholstered with kilims, and she collaborated with Padrón to create the Tres collection. 

Nanimarquina’s Tres series is a luxurious line of hand-loomed rugs (and poufs) that is inclusive of textiles intended for both indoor and outdoor spaces. The Tres rug is a traditional Indian Dhurrie flat weave rug. The collection has won a range of awards, including the El País Out of Series award in 2016 and the Good Design Award in 2017 and 2018. The Tres outdoor rugs are water- and weather-resistant and are made with 100% recycled PET fibers, which is a process that involves recovering and reusing polyethylene waste. The Tres Vegetal collection fits well into rustic interiors and is equally eco-conscious — it’s made of jute fibers, which is a wholly natural 100% biodegradable and recyclable fiber.

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. 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. 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 and Elisa Padrón rugs 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.

Good antique rugs and vintage rugs have made their way into homes across the globe, becoming fixtures used for comfort, prayer and self-expression, so choosing the right area rug is officially a universal endeavor.

In modern usage, “carpet” typically denotes a wall-to-wall floor cushioning that is fixed to the floor. Rugs, on the other hand, are designed to cover a specific area and can easily be moved to new locations. However, the terms are interchangeable in many parts of the world, and, in the end, it won’t matter what you decide to call it.

It’s well known that a timeless Persian rug or vintage Turkish rug can warm any interior, but there are lots of other styles of antique rugs to choose from when you're endeavoring to introduce fresh colors and textures to a bedroom or living room.

Moroccan Berber rugs are not all about pattern. In fact, some of the most striking examples are nearly monochrome. But what these rugs lack in complexity, they make up for in brilliant color and subtle variation. Moroccan-style interiors can be mesmerizing — a sitting room of this type might feature a Moroccan rug, carved wooden screens and a tapestry hung behind the sofa.

Handwoven kilim rugs, known for their wealth of rich colors and unique weaving tradition, are pileless: Whereas the Beni Ourain rugs of Morocco can be described as dense with a thick surface or pile, an authentic kilim rug is thin and flat. (The term “kilim” is Turkish in origin, but this type of textile artistry is practiced all across the Balkans, throughout the Arab world and elsewhere.) 

When it comes to eye-catching floor coverings, the distinctive “medallion” pattern of Oushak rugs has two types of rounded shapes alternating against a rich red or blue background created with natural dyes, while the elaborate “star” pattern involves large eight-pointed shapes in diagonal rows alternating with diamonds.  

If you’re looking for something unexpected, find a runner rug that pops in your hallway or on your stairs. Dig for dazzling geometric patterns in our inventory of mid-century modern rugs and carpets, which includes works designed by the likes of Swedish textile masters Märta Måås-Fjetterström, Marianne Richter and other artisans. 

Carpets and rugs have been around for thousands of years. Prehistoric humans turned to animal skin, wool and fur to craft simple fabrics to soften hard terrain. A 2016 study suggests that "cave lions" were hunted for exactly this purpose, and that decorating your cave with their pelts may have conferred strength and prestige. Although many of these early textiles are still in existence, tracing their precise origins is difficult. Carpets quickly became such a valuable trade commodity that the weavings could easily travel far from their places of origin. 

The oldest known carpet was found in southern Siberia. (It may have traveled there from Persepolis in Iran.) For the flat-weave floor rugs crafted by Native Americans, cotton was the primary material before sheep’s wool was introduced in the 16th century. In Europe, carpet-making was fundamental to folk art, and Asian carpets imported to European countries were at one time considered a precious luxury and not intended to remain permanently on the floor. 

With the variety of area rugs and carpets rolled out for you on 1stDibs — a collection that includes traditional, modern, minimalist rugs and other coverings of all kinds — things will be looking up whenever you’re looking down.