Behind the Design: Our New Barcelona Pillows and Dinnerware

Inspired by a recent trip to the Park Güell in Barcelona, one of our head designers came back to San Francisco with a camera roll brimming with ideas. Park Güell was built over the course of 14 years by famed Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí, and is one of the largest architectural works in the world. The masses of curving stone, covered in tiny broken bits of tile caught our designer’s eye, so she snapped some pictures to take back to PB HQ. Take a look at a couple of her inspiration shots below:

The majority of the park is covered in broken tile, carefully plastered together in intricate patterns and designs. There’s a unique mix of patterns and shapes on almost every surface.

The curving shapes and bold patterns felt like a natural fit for a textile design. After perusing these photos, one of our in-house designers experimented and painted several new patterns inspired by these colorful, curving, tile designs.

Here’s a few snapshots of her paintings. Aren’t they beautiful? Some patterns took on a life of their own, expanding into several different designs. Others were just one-offs.

Several of the paintings (the two at the top of this image) lent themselves to an all-over repeating pattern. Our textile team scanned in these paintings and carefully engineered a pattern based off her designs in warm and cool color palettes.

The result is our new Barcelona pillows, dishware and table linens — part of our latest summer collection. The design retains the original tile-like shape and painted style of the pieces that inspired it.

See the rest of our summer preview, here.