Weave and weft: Bolon reveal customisable flooring system

Swedish design company Bolon unveils a new chapter in its illustrious flooring history. The brand, specializing in vinyl weave, started producing rugs in the late 1940s using waste material. It's come a long way since, incorporating a respected design language into its product development. Now, the third generation of the founding family is introducing a further element into its design equation, allowing users to customize their flooring to explore and celebrate the creative possibilities therein.

Launching early next year during Stockholm Design Week, Bolon By You is an interactive collection conceived with interiors designers and architects in mind, who will be able to create bespoke flooring to bring out the best of their spaces.

'This is a defining moment in our history,' says Marie Eklund, the company's chief creative officer. 'We always pride ourselves on being flexible for our customers, and our latest collection takes this to new levels.' Eklund notes how, for the first time, customers are going to be able to design and test unique solutions to suit their needs, combining the versatile flooring savoir-faire of Bolon with a new creative frontier. Offering new levels of versatility to deliver bespoke results, Bolon will allow customers to choose a pattern from a new collection of six, then customize the colours, warp and weft of their weave, which will be then woven to order.

To give a wider creative context to this venture, Eklund enlisted London-based design duo Doshi Levien, who were tasked with developing the image of Bolon By You with a conceptual art direction of the project. Working closely with the creative team in Sweden, the pair created compositions that bring the collection to life through material interventions that resulted in captivating sets, highlighting the capabilities of the floors.

'What is important is that people appreciate this material,' says Nipa Doshi. 'These floors are essentially textiles – they’re jacquard floors. When I first saw them being woven at Bolon, I immediately fell in love with them.' The designers' work, which will also be the subject of a campaign to promote the project, was the result of research into a more intuitive, direct way to engage with the material. Their interventions were, as Levien explains, 'inspired by natural, muted tones of classic architecture and monolithic forms of modernist buildings to the avant garde world of fashion'. A magnificent cultural palette for a collection that celebrates craftsmanship and artistic flair in an equally discreet and potent way.