Fortuny + Phelippeau Tapissier
A partnership built on craft and conviction
Fortuny and Phelippeau Tapissier have found each other—two houses whose work has long occupied the same rare territory: art made slowly by hand, using ancient techniques, for clients with exquisite taste.
The partnership
Both houses have practiced the same traditions for long enough that a collaboration was overdue. Each has earned its standing by resisting the pressures that have diminished so many of their contemporaries—the pull toward speed, scale, and the kind of visibility that costs more than it gives. They found, in each other, a shared conviction: a commitment to the object, to material, to the glory of process.
The vision
The design world has grown louder, and harder to be quiet in. Restraint used to be its own distinction. Now it takes work to hold that position.
In this unity, Fortuny and Phelippeau Tapissier are combining what they both cherish: personal relationships with the designers and collectors who matter, objects that resist replication, and a presence in the centers of beauty and decadence: New York City and Venice. Together they can reach further than either can reach alone.
This partnership is built on credibility, and on the belief that the finest things in the world need only the right introduction.
Maury Riad, Chief Executive Officer, Fortuny
About Phelippeau Tapissier
Maison Phelippeau was founded in 1953 by Roger Phelippeau, heir to a lineage of weavers and upholsterers stretching back to the end of the 19th century. The house has spent three generations refining techniques that most of the trade has forgotten, and stands now among France’s distinguished upholsterers.
From the Classical to ultra-contemporary styles, Phelippeau Tapissier produces unique materials for exceptional locations all over the world at the request of architects, designers, manufacturers and distributors of design products, and private clients. The house brings to the art of fabric a technical precision and patience that is unrivaled.
About Fortuny
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was born in Granada in 1871 and settled in Venice in 1889, where he would remain for 60 years. A painter and inventor, he came to fabric through the same curiosity he brought to everything else—a desire to learn how to bend it to his will. He mixed his own dyes and pigments from the formulas of the ancient masters, built his own machines, and registered 20 patents along the way. The fabric that emerged held centuries of craft and mystery within it. He soon became known as the Magician of Venice. He printed his fabrics on the island of Giudecca; in the Factory he opened in 1922 on the grounds of an ancient convent. He decreed that the methods behind them were never to be revealed—and they never have been. Today Fortuny creates its fabrics in the same Factory as it always has, using the same techniques, by hand.