Spanish company Rafael Catalá is one of the 100 oldest family-run businesses in the world. The 240-year-old firm designs and manufactures exquisite home-furnishing textiles which it exports all over the world. The fabrics are the home equivalent of deluxe haute couture and pret-a-porter.
This company’s textiles have graced such iconic buildings as Madrid’s Prado museum, the Élysée Palace in Paris, the Jewel House in the Tower of London and the Kennedys’ presidential suites in the White House.
On September 3 this year, having established that its textiles were popular in Latin America, Rafael Catalá decided to open its first shop – called Rafael, Telas y Decoración (Rafael, Textiles and Home Decoration) – in this very continent, specifically in the Colombian capital of Bogotá.
Rafael, Telas y Decoración is a new concept for a shop bringing exclusive fabrics made in Spain to the Colombian market. It offers a wide selection of classical and contemporary textiles with different textures, patterns and rich colours. In total, the shop offers 680 home fabrics and 450 fashion fabrics.
Situated very near one of Bogotá’s main shopping streets, the shop occupies part of a Victorian-era building with interiors in a contemporary European style. This one-storey, 150m sq showroom, where the fabrics take centre-stage, has been designed with a huge amount of care, and primarily to make it an enjoyable place for clients to visit.
Here you can find home-furnishing textiles in different fabrics, styles and colours, designed for creating interiors which harmoniously fuse traditionalism and modernity. Alternatively, these fabrics can be used to create interiors ranging from the very classical to the very cutting-edge. Only natural fibres are used as raw materials: wool, silk, linen, etc. The textiles’ sophisticated mix of textures and fabrics has the added appeal of coming in a range of colours in a mainly a neutral palette teamed with accents of intense, luminous colour.
All Rafael Catalá’s fabrics are made at the company’s HQ in Valencia, Spain, using a mix of ancient and new methods – from 18th-century wooden looms to the most state-of-the-art textile-making technology. What’s more, the company has its own in-house design department specifically devoted to developing on-trend fabric ranges.
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