World premiere! Verner Panton's Astoria and Gate
At this year's IMM in Cologne, DESIGNERCARPETS by Teppich Drechsle is presenting two new carpet models by Verner Panton for the first time. The designs date back to Panton's creative period in the 1960s. Both models are hand-knotted in Nepal from the best New Zealand wool and are each available in two colors.
Marianne Panton, the widow of the Danish designer, and Stefan Drechsle, the managing director of DESIGNERCARPETS, decided in 1999 to revive Panton's carpet designs. After many re-editions over the last 17 years, Drechsle is now devoting himself to the new edition of the Astoria and Gate carpets.
Panton designed the Astoria design in 1960. DESIGNERCARPETS offers it in two color combinations: the VP Astoria Coral , in a warm coral red on a subtle ivory background; the VP Astoria Greige in a beige with gray accents, also on ivory. The patterns on both carpets are identical and consist of color-changing, checkerboard-like squares. A calm pattern in itself. The highlight are the smaller squares placed on the corner, which fill exactly 7 x 7 fields and then the next 7 x 7 fields with the opposite color. Large squares are thus wrested from the calm checkerboard, with its even horizontal and vertical rows. A simple graphic trick with visual significance, which reflects Panton's pronounced artistry and his passion for shapes and colors.
The designs for the VP Gate date back to 1966. They consist of squares, triangles and circles in black, beige, red and petrol. Each colour is contrasted with a lighter shade of itself, and the black is contrasted with beige. The straight edges of the polygons deceive the eye and create the illusion of lines where there are no lines. This carpet also looks as if it is structured by large squares. Even the dots seem to float in squares. A graphic trick from the great designer's bag of tricks that is as simple as it is ingenious. The VP Gate 1 and the VP Gate 2 only differ in the redistribution of the light and dark colour weights and the different arrangement of the shapes. It is astonishing how similar and yet completely different the two carpets look thanks to these ingenious methods.
