A Functional Rug
A Zona rug, designed by Studio AKFB and photographed at Mattiazzi (image: Studio AKFB).
“It would be fairly easy to define the function of a chair or a tool,” writes designer Konstantin Grcic, one of the creative directors of Italian design brand Mattiazzi. “[But] what about a carpet?”
Grcic’s question is found on the back of a neat postcard printed as an interview with Annahita Kamali and Florian Böhm, founders of Studio AKFB and his fellow creative directors at Mattiazzi. Flipped over, the postcard reveals Zona, the carpet that the three are discussing. Photographed on a concrete floor, Zona’s different blocks of colour have been knotted and arranged across its wool to create the impression of three-dimensional architectural forms, but ones whose constellation shifts and reconfigures as you rotate the card. So, what is Zona’s function? “Well, that’s an interesting question,” begins Böhm in response.
Zona, photographed alongside the Clerici bench, designed by Konstantin Grcic (image: Studio AKFB).
Studio AKFB’s answer to Grcic is complex, but so too is the question itself. Grcic frames his query, for instance, in terms of architect Louis Sullivan’s famous maxim that “form follows function”, and there are numerous ways in which a rug can be said to follow this conception of design. A rug might offer comfort or warmth underfoot, while its shape or pattern could provide a sense of visual unity to a space – to paraphrase The Dude, he of The Big Lebowski fame, a rug can “really tie a room together”. Yet there is also a sense in which a rug escapes Sullivan’s conception of design. Given its status as decorative, rather than strictly utilitarian, a rug’s function is woolier and less clearly defined than objects which meet explicitly practical purposes– functionally, it is less about enabling a set activity, and more about stimulating certain responses in its users, be they sensorial, emotional or aesthetic. Its form does not so much follow function, as serve as the function itself – the responses it triggers are what it’s there to do. “Since rugs are often part of a larger arrangement with furniture, the overall mood and how the rug integrates into the space itself were our main concerns,” write Kamali and Böhm.
In this regard, there are numerous answers that could be given to Grcic’s question, but one thing that Zona undeniably functions as is a series of firsts for all involved in the project. Since Mattiazzi’s emergence as a design brand in 2010, having previously worked as a specialist wooden producer for other companies, the company’s output has largely been restricted to wooden furniture and objects – an approach that emphasised use of its existing expertise and in-house facilities, enlivened by leading external designers such as Grcic, Industrial Facility, Marialaura Irvine, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. With Zona, however, the company is taking a first step into a new area of design, with a new material. “When Konstantin invited us to develop a series of rugs for Mattiazzi, we thought it was a great idea and made sense,” says Böhm. “Why shouldn’t a design brand like Mattiazzi experiment and try things out beyond wooden furniture? This marks a significant step in the brand’s evolution, combining its design philosophy with the traditions of textile craftsmanship.”
A Zampa stool, designed by Jasper Morrison, atop Zona (image: Studio AKFB).
Zona, which is hand-knotted and dyed in Nepal, and which comes in three patterns and sizes, presents the possibility of a new avenue of inquiry for the brand – one in which its design values and aesthetic can extend outwards from its heartland business. Mattiazzi may not produce textiles in-house, but its emphasis on handwork paired with advanced technology (the brand made its name through innovative use of CNC milling combined with traditional craft work) has been followed through in the production in Nepal, where all the colours are mixed by hand by a dye master who blends pigments by their feel alone, but who is supported in this work by digital calculation of weaving patterns to reduce textile waste. “It’s a rug that is complimentary to the products from Mattiazzi,” Kamali says, “and we wanted to give the furniture a space where they fit, and where they feel as if they belong.”
In this regard, the Zona rugs serve as an evolution of the scenography that Studio AKFB has created for Mattiazzi’s annual displays at Milan’s Salone del Mobile trade fair since 2022. “In the past, they had displayed their furniture against white backdrops, but we wanted to put the furniture into some kind of context,” Böhm explains. In 2022, for instance, the studio exhibited Mattiazzi’s work against abstract architectural photography, before following this in 2023 with textural images of materials. In 2024, this process of abstraction was taken further, with AKFB utilising blocks of colour as backdrops, arranged such that their different tones worked together to suggest three-dimensional architectural forms. “We had these running up and down the booth, and then Konstantin said it would be nice to have them on the floor too – like rugs,” recalls Kamali. “The next step was to create this kind of 3D moment, but flat on the floor.”
Zona with an MC 23 Oto console, designed by Studio Π(image: Studio AKFB)
If Zona is a first for Mattiazzi, it is also a first for Studio AKFB. The practice made its name working within publishing, graphic design and communication. Kamali and Böhm, whose own backgrounds fall within fashion design and photography respectively, have created books, magazines, animations and marketing campaigns for brands such as Vitra and Vestre; cultural organisations including the Vitra Design Museum; and also served as Disegno’s creative directors since 2016. The studio is well versed in the creation of publications and visual materials, but Zona represents the first time that its design work has moved into the realm of textiles and homewares. “It was different to work on something that is not just a communication project,” Böhm explains, “but also a product that has to last and have a certain quality.” Nevertheless, the pair found that their experience of working with print – which brings with it considerations of different paper stocks, graphics and colour – were applicable within the world of textiles. “A rug is kind of the perfect intersection between the product world and more visual design,” Böhm adds, “so it was a world where we felt comfortable, even if it was different working on something that ends up being a product with an actual function.”
It is this question of function that proved recurrent throughout the development process of the Zona collection. In their own answer to Grcic’s question, printed on the postcard, AKFB describe providing function in their rugs through “colour as a mood generator”, positioning the different tones and shapes within the design as serving as a “kind of cartography for the room’s mood”. In the same manner as the studio’s scenography has provided the backdrop to Mattiazzi’s furniture at trade fairs, Zona is intended to frame furniture in the home, offering different areas and sections within its overall design that might work with different elements of a home. “One object might work best with the rug’s red corner, while another fits more naturally along the blue line on the opposite side,” they write. This sense of bricolage was also present in the development of the rug’s design. Kamali notes that their early tests focused around individual yarn samples, but that these proved misleading – the colours of the samples do not necessarily correspond to those achieved when the yarns are knotted together en masse, as they would appear in a finished rug. “Some colours that we thought would be dark looked much brighter in reality when woven or knotted, whereas some looked a lot muddier than we had expected,” she explains.
A constellation of different Zona rugs (image: Studio AKFB)
As such, the studio switched to working with knotted swatches, which they began to cut up into forms that they could subsequently collage together. “We really needed to work with those, because then you have the reality of how this will look,” Kamali explains. “We just cut up many, many small pieces and then looked at them in different lights – how does it look outside with the sun, how does it look in shadow? We tried to find colours that would hold up and work in all light situations, which would always be nice, and started to put them together.” In addition to harmonising the colours within the design itself, this required consideration of how they might interact with the spaces in which they find themselves in. “Doing something that should work on a wall is one thing, but how does this translate once it's on the floor, which you cannot be sure will be empty?” Böhm explains. “It's more than likely that there will be coffee tables, sofas, chairs, or whatever, and you have to anticipate that in your concept. Whatever you do has to work under those conditions, and should not only just work, but also enhance the situation.”
This, then, is how Studio AKFB hope that Zona may function. It is intended as a complement to the spaces in which it finds itself, as well as a complement to the work of the brand whose product range it has expanded into a new material. Mattiazzi built its reputation on designs that celebrated the brand’s expertise with wood, and which placed their material front and centre. In addition to being functional chairs, the brand’s most famous designs, works such as Industrial Facility’s Branca and Grcic’s Medici, luxuriate in their own materiality, respectively showcasing wood’s sinuousness and, conversely, its board-like flatness. With Zona, Kamali and Böhm have sought to extend this same graciousness with material towards wool. “It was clear that whatever we did, it had to to be a really high level in terms of materiality,” Böhm explains. “It wasn’t necessarily about presenting graphic idea; it was about presenting the centrality of a material.” To emphasise this, the designers chose to soften the geometry of their design by allowing the straightness of the lines of colour to be distorted by the natural fibres of the material. “We could have cut the lines to look more clean,” Kamali notes. “But we really like that the wool has this moment of fuzziness.”
Zona represents an extension of Studio AKFB’s role as co-creative directors at Mattiazzi, and into the realm of textile designers (image: Studio AKFB).
This, in its own respect, is a form of function, which as an idea need not always be grounded in considerations of brute practicality. Instead, function can be wooly and emotive, relishing in a material’s capacity to engender a feeling of warmth, connection, belonging or delight. “It all goes back to that question of the functionality of a rug,” Böhm explains. “The design really plays with that concept that a rug can define an area in a space, which we took even further – not only a rug defining one zone, but smaller shapes and forms in different colours within the rug forming even smaller zones.” It is, Kamali adds, something intended as a “cartography of a space”, and a design that can provide context and a sense of belonging for both the other items it interacts with in a space and for its users. “It’s something,” she concludes, “to really wrap it all together.”
Words Oli Stratford