Raw Collection for Aviation

by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance

For Raw, designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance explores the origins of our planet: the formation of the Earth, the foundation of civilization, the tension in the tectonic plates. The collection’s focus on minerals echoes the origins of his own creative memory, like a personal tribute to his childhood on the wild coasts of Brittany in France.

Raw transposes this hard material into something soft, thanks to Tai Ping’s unparalleled skills in hand-tufting. Duchaufour-Lawrance envisioned these designs as strong foundations for interiors: “By introducing this reference to untamed nature, I aim to translate something raw into a smooth and elegant anchor inside the home,” the designer explains.

The 11 refined rugs blend wool, silk, delicate silk, jute, lurex and Field, one of Tai Ping’s enhanced performance yarns. “Each pencil stroke I made is transcribed onto the rug, but with a different relationship to time. The line that took me just a moment to draw took much longer to tuft by hand into the design, just as the rock that I pick up in the forest took millions of years to form. I find those temporal modalities interesting, particularly as some of the rugs look like a sketch – a sketch that has required hundreds of hours of work.”

The translation of conception to material object conjured the drawings’ modeled volumes without losing their subtlety, so that the rugs seem carved, like a found piece of flint. “Tai Ping found the right balance to keep the drawing’s spirit. The rug exists as an object of its own. This interpretation by Tai Ping’s artisans demonstrates extraordinary craftsmanship. Each design was enhanced in a way I could not have anticipated,” Duchaufour-Lawrance recalls.

Duchaufour-Lawrance’s vision here is not just a picture on the floor, but an invitation to engage with nature’s most primal materials in the context of our lived spaces. Shaped silhouettes that are soft to the touch showcase Tai Ping’s superior talents as an interpreter of ideas into form.