05142015 Moooi Debuts Designer Rug at First NY Store

NEW YORK - Design visionary Marcel Wanders, co-founder and art director of Dutch home furnishings furniture and accessories brand Moooi, is in New York this week for the grand opening on May 15^th of Moooi's first U.S. showroom at 36 East 31 Street.  The opening also serves as the U.S. premiere of the first carpets produced and marketed by Moooi Carpets, a new company.

The new 3975-foot showroom will display Moooi Carpets in vignettes with the company's upholstery and accent furniture, as well as decorative objects and accessories in settings reminiscent of the company's jaw-dropping displays at the Milan fair.

Of Moooi Carpets' inaugural collection of 48 signature carpets first unveiled at Salone del Mobile last month in Milan, 14 will be on display at the showroom grand opening, which was set to coincide with New York Design Week. All signature designs, which have been licensed by cutting edge European designers from Wanders himself to Studio Job, Bertjan Pot and Front, may be ordered through the store in addition to the samples on display.  In addition to the designer signature rugs, a program dubbed Moooi Works carpets will also be available, though not yet up and running.

"Design your own carpet, retouch a Moooi Works carpet with 648 different colors or buy your favorite Signature carpet print. Moooi Carpets has it all. It's the reinvention of the carpet," says Moooi's CEO Casper Vissers, also in New York for Design Week.  All signature and Moooi Works rugs are customizable, and completely original designs can also be created by clients through the custom program.

The new rug program has applications for hospitality and other public spaces as broadloom in addition to residential use.  According to Vissers, Moooi Carpets offers unparalleled freedom of expression through a proprietary digital printing system, which designers in the signature program have tested to the max.  "This revolutionary machine is the cutting-edge result of a massive investment in terms of money and time. Several million euros and two years of building and testing have paid off," he said.

"Moooi Carpets' ace up the sleeve is an extremely big, fast, accurate and convenient machine. It is 100 meters in length and can print several unlimited colored designs on 400 cm width without changing injectors." The company says it will require only a very small minimum order, versus competitive printed carpets which required past production batches of at least 100m2 in order to make pricing competitive.

The company's Chromojet printer has been designed with a new technology that generates extremely high definition prints which can result in photo-realistic flooring solutions, which generate a playful illusion of depth, Vissers said, noting that the signature carpets are printed on an acrylic base.  

The surreal, eye-catching designs of the Signature Carpets convey a sense of depth, intensity and motion. The sometimes surreal, sometimes eccentric carpets have been designed by renowned names in the world of fashion, visual arts and design, including Bas Kosters, Bertjan Pot, Broersen en Lukács, Edward van Vliet, Front, Jurgen Bey, Klaus Haapaniemi, Maison Christian Lacroix, Marcel Wanders, Marian Bantjes, Neri&Hu, Ross Lovegrove, Sonya Pletes and Studio Job.

Each creation represents its designer and the amazing world of his/her expertise and imagination. In addition to the printed carpets, Moooi Carpets is also presenting  five 'jacquard woven carpets by Marcel Wanders, which, "with sophisticated and refined details, reproduce flat woven designs of 3D images that appear to be literally carved into the carpets."

Following are RugNews.com images at the new Moooi showroom.

05.14.15