La Casa Gandia Blasco

Several paths lead to Casa Gandia Blasco. One traces a route dotted by specific events: dates that shook up the fate of the company, pieces that became benchmarks for the habitat sector, groundbreaking carpets, furniture that blurred the line between indoor and outdoor styles. A journey structured by collections, from furniture to GAN carpets, an in-depth examination of every single piece, right through to the most comfortable chaise-longue in the catalogue. Worn out by the long tour, we would then kick back under a pine tree at the foot of the Mediterranean to feel the quintessence of Casa Gandia Blasco caressing our skin.

On the other hand, we could also stop beating around the bush and venture right into Casa Gandia Blasco without even ringing the bell, plunging straight into its metabolism, eagerly nosing around, hungry to identify which fuel drives its engine.
Boldness?, idealism?, conviction?, stubbornness? In terms of the company’s human capital, these aren’t just regular employees. This is a unique set of people who believe in teamwork, most probably as a concept based on elective affinities and self-selection. They didn’t just wind up in the same company; surprisingly they all share the same corporate vision. These things don’t normally happen, but there is nothing normal about Gandia Blasco. They’re one in a million. Don’t expect a prefabricated house.

Now that we’ve surrendered to the world of mobile devices, constantly connected to the unlimited Web, it’s worth questioning whether it makes sense to return to a scale that we can touch with our hands, to a territory that we can call home. A place laden with the smells and grooves of the real world, a space that integrates the scenes of life to their fullest extent. A space that veers away from separation to bring together the physical and the emotional, function and work.
A place where we can even dare to conjure up the most hidden meanings of the home. Are we willing to overstep issues like style, decoration or trend to analyse exactly how we want to live? Can we imagine a life-house concept where everything fits?

La Casa Gandia Blasco stands as a real and a metaphorical space. It’s a personal proposal that goes beyond the furniture and opens up a consideration about ways of life and the role that design plays in configuring the world we inhabit and our relationship with people and objects. Casa Gandia Blasco considers the reciprocity between the private and the social, and the need to tackle substantial arguments, identity, coexistence, culture, learning, knowledge, business, personal fulfilment. Obviously, Casa Gandia Blasco is not for sale. It stands as an invitation to reconsider the issue from top to bottom and to suggest solutions that lighten our existence and facilitate the experience of completeness and Beauty. There is always time to back down.

Na Xemena

Have we mentioned Na Xemena yet? A lot has probably been said about this architectural piece located on the top of a hill facing the sea, on the island of Ibiza. The house belongs to José A. Gandía-Blasco Canales, although it’s more than a house: Na Xemena holds the key to understanding this story. We will now embark on a journey, a rite of passage, that closes the circle. We need to go back to the beginning. It happened by accident, almost. It was born from an outlandish idea: to manufacture outdoor furniture using aluminium profiles for windows. It was almost like DIY. Lack of money fuels imagination.

The year was 1996, and the wicker chair was the be all and end all of outdoor furniture. It was high time to improvise something that would tie in with the rehabilitation of the house. That experiment was like doing a triple back flip without a safety net, since the blanket company set its eyes on outdoor furniture. Over time, the mini-collection Na Xemena became the company’s flagship product and gained a cult-like status. Fate always manages to find its way (and to surprise us).

This house represents the aesthetic, conceptual and spiritual culture of Gandia Blasco, lacing the air with reminiscences of its origin, an atavistic sea that gave birth to several civilizations. A personal manner of understanding the Mediterranean, the communion with Nature, the sensoriality, the light and a certain degree of mysticism. However, Na Xemena can be taken as a cautionary tale: follow your instinct, listen to your intuition, believe in your dreams, they will guide you better than a compass. Does that sound funny? You can live without furniture, you can even live without a house. But you can’t live without dreams.

look in the mirror

What use is it to have reached a hundred countries and to have shops and showrooms dotted around the globe if you don’t recognise yourself when you look in the mirror? Gandia Blasco has never forgotten its biography. The company rethought itself after a four decade career (spanning from the early 1940s to the late 1980s) manufacturing and exporting top quality blankets. They took their expertise, gave it a twist and stayed true to their roots.

At the time, they took a high risk bet when they decided to put their money on contemporary design. True to its origin, the company designed textile lines for the home, building the world of carpets into their offer. They focused on seeking a new and personal language channelled through excellent designs. In the mid 90s the company Gandia Blasco debuted unexpectedly in the outdoor furniture sector with Na Xemena, a small collection that blew everyone away. Nobody understood it! They didn’t give up though, they fought on.

Let’s go back to the subject of memories and consider one of the most intelligent ways of preservingthem: architecture. Gandia Blasco’s head offices are about just that, about translating values into architecture. Above all, though, it’s about being able to detect those values, to recover them and promote them. It’s not about looking, it’s about seeing. And then acting accordingly.

Construction started in 1941, in the very centre of Ontinyent. The building was seen, by those who actually noticed it, as an attempt crafted by a disciple of rationalism to leave behind a notable creation on the landscape of squalid post-war Spanish architecture. After the rehabilitation works, the window that simply used to run up and along the whole façade blankly has now grown wings and taken on the appearance of a visual poem. Now it arouses curiosity: something’s cooking in Casa Gandia Blasco…

The mere decision of expanding the sides of the rectangle has redirected the construction towards the key concept in architecture, light. Light is also the tentpole of Gandia Blasco’s narrative: bright, fluid spaces, essential lines, joyful, gentle. Is it not precisely that vitalist conception of design, and that indolent and playful way of understanding beauty, that has made this one of the favourite brands on the international scene? Mind, though, achieving this simplicity isn’t as simple as it seems. We can’t be simpletons.

“Come in, I’ll show you the building,” says José A. Gandía-Blasco, chairman of the company. He’s the link, the thread that connects past, present and future. He is a free, restless spirit. Born to hunt, to design products and to draw new pathways.
Amazingly, he never gives orders: “I have blind faith in my team,” he says. His command style is twice as efficient, as it’s based on trusting others. That’s probably why he never worked as a lawyer, although he studied Law. “José” is just another team member. He stimulates and brings them together, but in the end he’s an independent creative executive. He’s really excited about the possibilities opened up by Casa Gandia Blasco (which, actually, accommodates his own house inside, parts within parts, like the layers of an onion).

He leads us into the belly of a monster that remained dormant until not long ago. The construction spreads out over more than 6,000 sq. metres (four floors, basement, mezzanine and courtyard), taking up a whole block of the city. For over half a century, time stood still in some of the ramshackle warehouses. Once the rehabilitation works are completed, the structure will be ready to tell new stories. “These galleries housed the machines,” he says, “and those were where the blankets were stored because they required a lot of space”.

Tactile intelligence

As he thinks back to those days, a sliver of sunlight magically slices through the dark room. We are not alone, millions of specks of dust float in the immensity of time striking up a silent conversation. You then realise that a company’s standing is also measured by its respect for the past. Catalogues cannot capture moments like that. People born in these lands recognise the smell of processed wool, cotton, cloth, dyes, the convenience of the nearby mountains and rivers. Since the Middle Ages, and long before, the soul of this region has been textile to the core. Or it was at least. What remains is guarded and stimulated by Gandia Blasco. Readily, not snobbishly, as if it were the most organic thing in the world.

Living your childhood to the beat of textile mills marks your emotional education. Their awareness of textures and matters has allowed Gandia Blasco to develop a very fine tuned tactile intelligence. This company also knows how to pick out a good artisan in a crowd. Everything is produced without leaving the house; quality, like nobility, obliges. Consequently, their designs add the qualities of authenticity and honesty, given their support of and commitment to the industry and economy of the area. Gandia Blasco has been supporting sustainability and thinking locally for years, it’s threaded into its DNA.

Fuelling the engine

We rid our jumper of the fuzz of past times and, on our way to the courtyard, José A. Gandía-Blasco Canales excitedly talks about the Project. The time has come for Casa Gandia Blasco –the real place and the metaphor– to become a physical and symbolical expression of the principles that have give way to and continue to fuel the brand. The structure stands for the brand. It involves creativity, mobility, interrelation, exchange, invention, transparency. It involves shedding light on the values within, fuelling the engine.

The space designated for offices and administration has been relocated to a vast section on the first floor, whilst the third and fourth floors are home to new sections that cater to the exchange of knowledge, research and debate. Meetings, workshop and exhibitions will structure a programme that aims to combine ideas and praxis. It goes beyond intuition, it’s about giving them content and shaping them, selecting the material and the technology, producing the object and, ultimately, being able to communicate its distinctive and unique value in a super competitive world on a global scale.

This initiative strengthens Gandia Blasco’s contribution to the creation of new industrial dynamics, whilst promoting synergies between the corporate and production sectors, the field of education and the world of culture and arts. Their support for emerging talent –thanks to the Gandia Blasco Competition– ties in with a multidisciplinary proposal. The Casa del Conocimiento (House of Knowledge) provides a way to understand design and transfer it to all sides of everyday life.

Overlapping maps for indoor, passdoor, outdor

Detached, prefabricated, semidetached, detachable… Forget about stereotypes, inflexibility and dogmas when it comes to houses. It’s not a case of moving or changing the furniture, it’s about changing the perspective. In the sands of this slippery turn of the century, is there a concept sturdy enough to stop a house crumbling down?

The conceptual strategy that structures Casa Gandia Blasco has relied on transferring the exercise in design to the very epicentre of movement to achieve long-lasting and stable results (do not mistake stability with immobility). This dynamic allows us to identify the three concepts developed by Casa Gandia Blasco: Indoor, Passdoor and Outdoor. This space continuum explains Casa Gandia Blasco and structures the different furniture options. The success of a table, a bench or sunshade goes beyond a convenient shape.

This system of overlapping maps faces design with one of its most difficult challenges: where is the boundary that separates the inner skin from the outer layer? We need to rethink criteria and ask ourselves if when we exit our microcosm is it not, in fact, to enter a larger cosmos, be it city, country or Nature. The Casa Gandia Blasco considers these relationships, contexts and the fluidity of the spaces we live in. The impossibility of freezing movement and action.

The courtyard, heart and agora

After visiting the different “homes” we walk out into the courtyard and into a different system. How does this large open air square influence the dynamics of Casa Gandia Blasco? It mirrors the vital role that a heart plays in a body. Nevertheless, in other ways the courtyard represents the organisational, psychosocial and humanist superstructure of Casa Gandia Blasco. It establishes the grounds for plurality and coexistence, the “polis” and the “civitas” of Antiquity. Yet this construction lives, breathes and evolves in the present.

We’re welcomed by Sansón, standing on his huge hind quarters and giving us warm XL size hugs (he must not know he’s a dog and, even less, a Saint Bernard). “Sansón, if you get in the way I’ll have to tie you up,” warns José A. Gandía Blasco Canales. Enter Murphy’s Law. The dog could mess things up, and he does. Shaded by a lemon tree, he listens attentively to his master’s voice, even when his words aren’t directed at him: “I want this courtyard to be for everyone,” says José A. Gandía-Blasco. “Woof! Woof!,” Sansón protests, as if to say ‘The courtyard’s mine!’

When you sort out the problem of dealing with productive and leisure time, you realise there is time for everything. This space recuperates the forgotten art of conversation; it echoes the agora of ancient Greece, the quintessential public space. How wonderful to find this real courtyard in a real house in a real village (even though the country seems less real by the day).

The chiringato (a word put together mixing two Spanish terms: chiringuito (kiosk) + gato (cat) –the corporate anagram) is a reflection of the courtyard, an invitation to chill out in the garden or terrace. It is a symbol of the easygoing, super cool spirit, the deepest dimension of the homo ludens. In fact, the courtyard is home to barbecues, it’s where the media improvise sets and where people plunge into the pool when least expected. A lemon tree, an orange tree and a laurel add a lot to the scene. Life does not have to be that complicated.

In the courtyard one feels the chemistry of the place and infers the infinite possibilities. Yet the script is still unwritten, the tale does not end here, it’s only just beginning. One learns to inhabit Casa Gandia Blasco just like one learns to live in one’s skin. No instruction manual, you learn on the go.