Craft design duo Superfolk example the rise of their Co Mayo based brand

Carol O’Callaghan looks at the rise and rise of craft design duo, Superfolk, currently riding a wave of demand. 

This year just past saw everything take off for Superfolk, an up-and-coming Irish interior brand that is also garnering an international reputation.

For its principals, Gearóid Muldowney and Jo Anne Butler, 2016 is already promising to be equally busy while they work to keep up with demand for their products, and at the same time, await the imminent arrival of their most recent collaborative project — their first baby.

Based in Co Mayo where they design and make a range that includes tables, stools, prints, tea towels and trivets, this location on the western edge of Ireland is the major player in how the range is imagined and developed.

“Nature and the environment inform the pieces,” says Gearóid, “but not in a stylised way.”

But neither are they rough-hewn to mirror such a rugged landscape — rather they are fully an amalgam of material heritage and modern methods where Gearóid and Jo Anne work slowly and deliberately to make beautiful, honest objects that have quality and refinement, yet the durability to withstand the rigours of daily domestic life.

Craft by its nature is a slow process, born out of respect for materials and time-honoured skill. Much like its parallel in food, the Slow Food Movement, we are developing a greater understanding of how quality that comes from a slow process is to be valued and appreciated, if not coveted.

For Gearóid and Jo Anne it began when they met in design college. Both are graduates of the National College of Art and Design where Jo Anne studied fine art and later architecture at University College Dublin.

“My background is in metal so really I should be making jewellery,” quips Gearóid. Such modesty belies the fact that he holds a degree in craft design from NCAD and from Lahti University of Applied Science in Finland. But it was time spent as a workshop hand for other makers that eventually progressed him towards working with Jo Anne.

Their first professional collaboration was in 2008, when invited to design a range of stools and tables for an art exhibition. A year later, an invitation to Greenhouse, Stockholm Furniture Fair’s exhibition for emerging designers, gave them international exposure.

Since then they’ve appeared at some of the leading design shows in the world including the London Design Festival, Maison et Objet in Paris, Tokyo’s Design Week and Design March in Reykjavik. Meanwhile their contract furniture made its way to Hamburg and London, the latter including chairs for the café at Somerset House, home to the prestigious Courtauld Gallery.

Now Superfolk sells in places like Berlin’s Bauhaus Museum, in France and in Japan with an ever-growing reach that requires a considerable amount of travel for Gearóid. In turn, one would think this necessitated being based in a big city near an international airport, but instead he and Jo Anne turned away from urban living, packed up the wagons and headed west, back to Mayo where they both grew up and where Superfolk now designs and makes products for sale here in Ireland and worldwide.

With just two of them designing and making in the workshop, with no additional staff and a growing business, how do they keep up? “We have some outsourcing,” Gearóid explains. “Our fabrics for tea towels and prints come ready hemmed, but we do everything else ourselves.”

To look at the pattern of a wall-hanging is to see edible seaweeds they’ve foraged. A trivet made from ash to hold a hot cooking pot echoes the shape of a wild daisy or maybe a sea urchin, depending on where your imagination takes you. A tea towel design on Irish linen is inspired by dry stone walling and even a pastime like fishing informs the work.

“I fly fish,” explains Gearóid. “In the trout environment everything is influenced by the Ph balance of the bedrock which affects the fish living there.”

His comment is a little off-topic but in it is a keen and detailed observation of nature that in turn impacts Superfolk’s products, singling them out, bridging as they do the gap between old and new — the landscape formed over millennia and new designing and making methodologies that ensure they travel well and are easily understood abroad.

* Stockists: Ardmore Pottery, The Cliff (Dunmore East), Maven (Belfast), Kaleidoscope (Westport).