Carpet Concept

As there was no money in the budget for hiring designers, company founder Thomas Trenkamp simply designed the first collection himself. From his experience as sales director in a commercial carpeting firm, he knew his industry from the ground up and thought he could do things better. For example, he revived old weaving techniques and combined them with upto- the-minute concepts such as metal inserts. The original craft of weaving is thus tied together with modern fabrication technology. The result is extraordinary carpeting that exudes the charm of old-time craftsmanship but with a high-tech finish.

One of the main goals is – and the use of the vocabulary of classical Modernism is no coincidence – to create honest products that display their woven structure. The prerequisite for doing so is the existence of a lively design culture. The entrepreneur from the Westphalia region is committed to lasting quality, guaranteeing the continued availability of his products for 15 years. Companies like FSB, which stand for integrity and intensive communication with their designers, are explicit role models. Design is a top management priority. One of the difficulties in this mission, according to Trenkamp, is that both industrial and furniture designers always think in three dimensions. A surface that must subordinate itself to other things now and then is therefore alien to them at first. In the meantime, however, designers such as Konstantin Grcic of Munich and the Hamburg-based Hadi Teherani and Peter Maly as well as Berliner Carsten Gollnick are represented in the catalogue. A larger dose of German avant-gardism is hard to imagine. This is demonstrated by the company’s over 60 design awards, for products including Tec Wave and Tec Pearl. These novel woven carpets are all about the parity of nap and ground. The metal thread penetrates the coloured ground in waves. The designs arise out of the alteration between squares and stripes, with the metallic effects resting atop it all like a veil. Year after year, the Lyn collection by Maly and Gollnick has played a key role in anchoring the young brand’s popularity, especially amongst architects. Carpet Concept products can thus be found in such prestigious surroundings as the Helmut Newton Museum in Berlin or the new Bayern Stadium in Munich, to name just two examples of many.