It’s impossible to put Garance Vallée into a box. That’s likely because her Parisian upbringing in a family of creative polymaths pushed her to study architecture and scenography in college, when she began illustrating quaint scenes of painted fronds and wavy, surreal-inspired chairs. But an influential meeting with Ada Tolla—the LOT-EK founder who navigates sculpture, scenography, and architecture with ease—encouraged Vallée to broaden her stylistic vocabulary even further. That sparked a few marquee moments: a major Milan Design Week installation, a show at Carvalho Park, and illustrations for Maison Perrier-Jouët.
Add a new capsule collection with Nordic Knots to that list. An artful interpretation of the Swedish rug purveyor’s existing Grand Collection, the trio of New Zealand wool rugs features totemic cutouts at playful angles. They make enough of a statement on their own but also fit snugly together like puzzle pieces. “It works like tiny architecture, almost like a small modernist house,” Vallée says, which informed the decision to style and shoot the capsule in Maison Louis Carré, an Alvar Aalto villa on the outskirts of Paris. “[That] represents the link between my inspiration of the Modernist currents, but also has this very contemporary and 2.0 rigid angle—almost laser-cut shapes.”
The brand’s co-founders Fabian Berglund and Liza Laserow, who most recently collaborated with New York architect Giancarlo Valle on both a series of folkloric rugs and their new showroom in a historic Stockholm theater, had long admired Vallée’s approach to world-building. They were instantly on board when she presented the idea to scale up a series of small paper cutouts into rugs. “For us, how the rugs exist in a context of the art, furniture, and design around it is as important as the rugs themselves,” Berglund and Laserow say. “With Garance, it’s all about the world she creates, where all the elements play together with each other, with the rugs being one part of that world.”
