Feltum Information

Feltum is a furniture design and production company with offices in Berlin and Mexico City. The design practice is dedicated to driving forward the application range of felt. We work with 100% wool felts as well as with synthetic felts. Much of our effort is research focused in the sense of building an ever increasing empirical knowledge base of how to work with the material. This is so, because not only has the material felt developed over the past decades, but other technological developments can provide solutions for combinations with felt that did not exist a short while ago. This is an ongoing process. An example for this is our CONCRETE table lamp. The synthetic felt used here is composed of a combination of polyester and bi-component fiber. When the material is heated, the bi-component fiber melts into polyester fibers which makes the resulting material rigid and structural. The melting point of the bi-component material is very low (95C) which makes the material unsuitable in traditional lamps. Developments in LED technology, however, have led to light bulbs which emit very low heat. In this way, we build lamps almost entirely in a structural fabric. Our GREY SHADES lamp (to be released at the end of Juli 2014) uses another kind of synthetic felt that differs from the usual isotropic qualities of felts. Its fibers are directional which allows the felt to be bent in one direction while displaying great stiffness in the other direction. This allow for self-supporting lamp shades, eliminating the distinction between base and shade. While we embrace technology, our products have a strong artisanal component. Our patterned carpets are composed of large numbers of CNC cut wool felt elements that are then hand stitched together. Our LINES carpet (4x3 meters) for example is held together by more than 40.000 hand stitches. Feltum was founded by Maria Jose (Pepa) Mendoza and Michael Fischer. They met in London in 2000 where Maria was working at Zaha Hadid Architects and Michael (a former banker turned ...