Tapestries and Textiles Give This Madrid Apartment a Modern Moorish Flavor

"Just renovated, but with no charm or personality” — judging from the time we've spent browsing Zillow, this is the precise way we'd describe so many homes that have hit the market in recent years. So it was for this 2,000-square-foot holiday apartment in Madrid, which was recently refreshed by local studio Casa Josephine for a young American-Kuwaiti businesswoman — who owns Ecru, a lifestyle brand based in Kuwait and India — and her family. Throughout the home, the designers have deftly blended a mix of influences, from Moorish to the Middle Eastern, to create a space filled with rich, contemporary textiles in colors that are unmistakably Spanish.
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This Swiss Designer’s Unfussy Furniture is Inspired By the Sunshine of His New Spanish Home

When Antonius Dreier moved from Switzerland to Madrid just over a year ago, the light and lifestyle in the Spanish city inspired a debut furniture collection from Studio Drei that’s most at home in the spots where the sunshine spills inside. “I think the move has had a great impact on my pieces,” he says. “The culture of this country and its craftwork are very present in my first catalogue.”
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In This Designer’s Hands, Recycled Leather Becomes Something Undeniably Cool

Continuing with a self-produced material he calls Structural Skin, Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés has turned his exploration of recycled leather waste into a sleek collection of mirrors and table lamps, on display earlier this month at the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan. Penadés gets the leather offcuts for his pieces from Hermès, which means the color palettes become a kind of artistic constraint — and yet, the shredded leather, combined with resin to create a reconstituted material, is undeniably cool, resembling marble or a particularly colorful particleboard.
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Daniel Entonado, Illustrator

Daniel Entonado is a Madrid-based illustrator, textile designer, and graphic designer whose drawings are dense, whimsical, and often totem-like. We stumbled on his work randomly on Instagram, but apparently according to some he's the "zine king of Madrid" — check out selections from his portfolio below, then see one of his zines in action on Vimeo.
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SuTurno, Graphic and Textile Designers

In some ways, Marc Jacobs is a bit like Oprah. With a flick of his influential magic wand, Posh Spice can suddenly be considered cool, Bleecker Street can become the place you simply must open your New York shop, and a Madrid-based, husband-and-wife graphic-design duo can go from virtual unknowns to the toast of magazines and blogs around the world. That’s what happened two years ago to Julia Vergara and Javier G. Bayo, co-principals of the print and pattern design shop SuTurno, whose Bolsaco tote — a simple canvas bag made from vintage stock found in an old warehouse in Spain — was spied by two of Jacobs’ buyers at the Madrid shop Peseta. “It was the first product we ever made with the SuTurno label on it, and it actually became our most hyped design to date,” says Bayo. The two were asked to produce a limited edition of bags for the Marc by Marc Jacobs stores in the States, and they promptly sold out within a few days.
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