For more than three years, the Argentinean sisters Sol Caramilloni Iriarte and Carolina Lopez Gordillo Iriarte kept a design studio on the second floor of a building in Barcelona, handcrafting an eponymous line of leather bags in relative privacy. Sol, 32, was working part-time as a set designer for films; Carolina, 25, had just finished a year apprenticing under her friend Muñoz Vrandecic, the Spanish couture shoemaker. Called Iriarte Iriarte, it was a modest operation.
And then in June, fate intervened: A charming little storefront became available at Carrer de l’Esquirol No.1, on the same block as Vrandecic’s shop, and the sisters transformed it into a showroom and studio with an open, almost autobiographical quality. Their main focus is still the leather bags, which they make by hand in shapes evocative of the satchels they carried as students attending English-speaking private schools in Buenos Aires. But they also stock references to their more recent past, including a series of necklaces with charms they’ve picked up along their travels and a selection of vintage furniture and shop fixtures acquired by Sol from her set-design projects. Up a narrow flight of stairs in back, a lofted studio lets visitors watch from below as the sisters hand-tool the bags and experiment with new ideas, like a series of shoe prototypes or a just-launched line of clothing that also riffs on their old school uniforms. “We taught ourselves how to work leather, but it’s not the only thing we’re doing,” explains Sol. “The goal isn’t to become the greatest leather artisans ever, it’s to design. We love to design. And we’ve learned to do it better by doing it the old way.”
Almost everything the Iriarte sisters know about hand-tooling leather, they taught themselves. Four years later, “we’re still not geniuses at it,” says Sol. But you’d never know it — the bag line is doing well, and when we visited, the pair were in talks with their first American retailer.
Sol (left) and Carolina (right) share equally in all the design and fabrication duties at Iriarte Iriarte.
Both sisters learned to sew from their mother, who was a seamstress; they’ve been making dresses for themselves since they were young. They spent the majority of the past year working on their first clothing line, whose A.P.C.-ish cuts recall their old private school uniforms.
A view of the showroom and studio, which opened to the public in June. The back of the downstairs space is used to spotlight the pair’s vintage finds.
Upstairs, most of the workspace is taken up by a large antique table, which may look familiar — it’s from the painting studio of Javier Bardem’s character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for which Sol worked on the set design.
The studio is filled with strap-cutters, hole punches, carving tools, and special glues that hold the bags together before they’re sewn and riveted. The walls are covered in leather straps, patterns cut from craft paper, and images that are inspirational to the duo (we weren’t allowed to photograph those).
Hanging from every nook are scraps of the leather they use to make the bags, which comes to them directly from an old Spanish tanner “who works in the countryside with the cows,” says Sol.
After they receive the leather, they dye it themselves by hand in shades of brown, navy, and black. It’s a messy job.
Since the studio is quite small, the bags go through nearly every stage of production on the worktable, from initial pattern-making to the finishing touches.
Simple metal buckles help give the satchels a classic look — like they could be from almost any time or place.
The finished satchels come in various sizes, from small to large. These are one of five styles from the current winter collection, which will stay in production until next summer.
In the showroom window are more of the winter bags, plus belts, necklaces, and prototypes for a forthcoming collection of leather shoes.
The effect is quite sophisticated, but objects Sol and Carolina keep around the studio, like this tin picturing characters from a 1970s British children’s TV show, paint a different picture: “We’re inspired by toys,” says Sol. “It’s like we’re eight years old.”
Another child-like relic: A baby piano the sisters keep stationed behind their sewing table, which Sol rescued from a woman who was throwing it out on the street.
The showroom is located at Carrer de l’Esquirol No.1, in Barcelona’s Born district.
The first thing people marvel at when they see the furniture of the young duo Sebastian Herkner and Reinhard Dienes is its industrial, institutional cool — bare wood against metal against richly colored glass, in shapes evoking old spotlights and torches and desk chairs. The second thing is how these hip, talented designers — whose first collection this year caught the eye of Wallpaper, DAMn, and Monocle — landed in Frankfurt, a middling city of 650,000 without a glimmer of Berlin’s cachet.
Once or twice a year, Brooklyn furniture designer Paul Loebach gets out his straw hat and bandana, ties on a pair of crappy old sneakers, drags out his huge canvas tote, and drives up to Massachussetts, where dealers from all over the Northeast gather every spring, summer, and fall for the Brimfield Antique Show.
This story was originally published on November 3, 2009. A year and a half later, Dror Benshetrit unveiled at the New Museum a simple, scalable structural joint system called QuaDror, which just may turn out to be his magnum opus. It takes obvious inspiration from the kinds of toys he shared with Sight Unseen here. // Some furniture expands if you’re having extra dinner guests, or folds if you’re schlepping it to a picnic. But most of it just sits there, content to be rather than do. This drives New York–based designer Dror Benshetrit crazy. “Static freaks me out,” he’s said, and so the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate has spent the entirety of his young career making things that either capture a state of transformation (his progressively shattered series of vases for Rosenthal) or actually transform themselves (the Pick Chair and Folding Sofa that flatten using simple mechanics). When I first saw Dror’s latest project, a trivet for Alessi whose concentric metal arcs are magnetized so they can be reconfigured endlessly — and even, the designer enthusiasticaly suggests, worn as a necklace — I thought: If he can’t even let a trivet sit still then his fascination with movement must be more than a design philosophy, it’s probably coded in his DNA. I was right. Dror has been obsessed with kinetic toys since he was a child.
