LEBLUME
The geometry of the Vélez Collection
An industrial designer by trade, Damián López founded his studio LEBLUME in Valencia in 2011 before returning several years later to Málaga in Andalusia, the city of his birth and childhood. Ever since then, he has been taking on projects within interior, product and graphic design, always with an interdisciplinary focus. Together with his team, he takes an holistic approach to each project, touching upon brand identity, space and objects to offer his clients and users a 360º experience.
Damián has created one of our most versatile terracotta tile collections. We are talking about the Vélez Collection, which was inspired by the geometric shapes found within traditional architecture such as the semicircular Roman arch or the circle itself, the perfect form, used within many cultures as a symbol for the divine. LEBLUME’s intention from the very beginning was to develop a curved geometric vernacular which would break with the prevalence of clean, straight lines that dominated among the tiles offered by todobarro up until that point.
Playing with the six pieces which comprise the Vélez Collection and combining them with other preexisting pieces in our catalog, it is possible to create patterns and tessellations for larger spaces, rhythms for transitory spaces such as hallways, cadences for paths and avenues or even borders such as the one employed by José Lara for Casadecor. Although their forms are rooted in traditional architecture, the myriad results which can be obtained by combining these terracotta pieces give rise to an aesthetic which is at once contemporary and avant-garde. Certain tessellations are reminiscent of 20 th -century Modernism, while others transport our minds to the world of psychedelic pop culture from the 1960s.
The name of the collection is a nod to the origin of the company and his own origins as well. The creative process employed by Damián López in the creation of this collection is based on experimentation and the pursuit of new opportunities. From the very genesis of the project, the objective has been to create a curved vernacular which could be combined with existing pieces within the todobarro catalog.
With this as his starting point, Damián initiated a process of observation and study whereby he selected a series of shapes which frequently repeat within traditional architecture. This then led him on to a process of experimentation in which Damián began toying with forms such as the arch, the circle, the semi-circle… with the objective of selecting a minimum number of pieces that would allow for the greatest number of combinations possible. Finally, after months of experimentation, Damián and his team selected six pieces, all mutually compatible both with each other and with many other pieces from our catalog.
