A Norwegian designer set up a handloom workshop above Rostrevor in 1949, her name never on the finished object. Her grandson runs it now, on the same looms. The cloth goes to Margaret Howell and Carl Hansen.
The workshop
Gerd Hay-Edie arrived in Rostrevor from Norway in 1949 and set up a handloom weaving workshop above the town, naming it for the mountains behind it. She placed her cloth with Robin Day, Hille and Terence Conran, her own name never on the finished object. That was the model, not modesty: the studio's role was to make the client's object better, not to compete with it for attention.
The continuity
Her grandson Mario Sierra runs it now, in the same building, on the same looms, some of them mid-century originals. A 2016 scholarship recognised his revival of Hay-Edie's original designs on her own looms, reconnecting the patterns, the machines and the family knowledge. The fabric goes to Margaret Howell, Carl Hansen and Pinch, and the label still reads their name, not his.
The cloth
Mourne weaves wool and natural fibre to a mid-century vocabulary that sits between Scandinavian modernism and British craft, because its founder stood at exactly that intersection. The hand and power looms produce a weight and surface that machine production cannot copy without losing what it is. Seventy-seven years of continuous production from one address.
At a glance
The TGC view
Mourne is the anonymous archive made visible: the workshop behind objects you already know. We arrange the introduction and the visit for guests who want to meet the maker the label does not name.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗A cabinetmaker opened a workshop at Boppard on the Rhine in 1819 and spent forty years learning to bend solid beech. What came out of it went to the customer in a crate, and the avant garde of the next century had no factory of its own until it had this one.
Read the review →A Kyoto workshop founded in 1875 has made the same object ever since, by hand, in a hundred and thirty separate procedures, out of a material Japan could not yet make for itself. Six generations have refined one thing rather than widen a range.
Read the review →A Munich manufactory has been making the same sixteen figures since 1760. The eighteenth century ones are museum objects and the new ones are catalogue items, and the gap between those two sentences is the whole story.
Read the review →