How can we create products that are more highly appreciated and better maintained? Stephan Hürlemann asked himself this question when he designed the Fellow rugs for the Fellow Project. In order to make people feel more connected to the product, he designed each of the pure wool rugs as a unique individual.

His design concept can be used to create countless unique and attractive rugs that are all part of a growing collective:

Building blocks:
The concept is based on a collection of 14 colours and five rectangles, which represent the smallest design elements. Each of the rectangles is composed of one or two coloured areas.

Worlds:
Different combinations of colours and rectangles result in numerous patterns. Adjacent areas of the same colour visually merge with each other. With these building blocks, Stephan Hürlemann created five worlds with different moods that are, for example, reminiscent of city maps or pixel graphics.

Sections:
In order to make the rugs as versatile as possible, five geometric shapes were determined: 1 square, 1 circle and 3 rectangles (1:1.33 | 1:1.5 | 1:4.5). Using these shapes, Hürlemann set out to find interesting sections and colour combinations in the pattern worlds.

Unique pieces:
In a first design phase, this resulted in 75 carpet pictures with different character – from colourful to monochrome, from dark to cheerful, from calm to lively. Each Fellow is recognisable as a part of its world and related to other Fellows through its building blocks.

Robotic tufting is particularly well suited to the production of unique pieces, as each virgin wool rug is individually tufted onto a backing fabric according to a digital dataset.

The naming system for the individual rugs is based on the scientific nomenclature for animals. The names combine genus and species in Latin. For Fellow, the genus is Tapetum (rug) and the species name refers to the pattern world from which the carpet originates (fluviale, ordinatum, arvale, viaticum and urbanum). The result is, for example, FELLOW Tapetum fluviale.

Photos by Stefan Altenburger

Collaboration