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

More than 30 couples of designers and artisans were formed. The participating craftsmen were those with high experience in several techniques and materials, such as stone, fabrics, leather, wax, wood, marble, forging, and 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 we understood the makers’ skills and the profiles of each operator, some of them more technicians than craftsmen, and also the capabilities and techniques available at the “Workshop,” we started to exchange ideas about design, innovation, and possible markets. We worked together and defined a brief.

MGP wanted a new collection with their own stamp. Usually, they received commissions from sellers in Germany, Poland, and Eastern Europe, but those models were already designed and defined by the sellers, ruling out any possibility of developing their own collection.

Our collaboration was centered on understanding our cooperative capacity, as designers, producers, and craftsmen, in order to achieve MGP’s autonomy in making furniture by themselves and entering the local and international market with their 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 through a shape synthesis process and giving it a more geometric volume with straight lines instead of ornamented surfaces and edges. The “M” was an essential and common shape across all pieces, and was included in the collection’s name as a play on the inspirational name of the Louis XV style.

Materials and processes: Initially, the project did not specify any particular finishing. The designs were proposed with a plain natural wood, giving MGP the freedom to choose the type of wood and final finishing depending on the client, seasonal collection, or commission. However, the collection was presented at 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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