Classic Modern Design Spotlight on Ege Rya
Rugs produced in the 60s and 70s by Danish company Ege Rya are still going strong today
Ege Taepper has a motto, which has guided its working principles and aims from the beginning: "Ege shall meet the customer's expectations. The customer's expectations shall be brought into harmony with reality." During the 1960s, however, the Ege Rya brand eschewed reality and took up residence in a sci-fi fantasy, as demonstrated in the advertisements reproduced below which span the period October 1962 to February 1970.
The Ege Rya brand had a stylish, offbeat character from the start, with vaguely surreal adverts featuring the rugs in a series of inappropriate outdoor locations, and as the 1960s progressed both the rugs and the advertising campaigns for them increasingly took on the space age aesthetic. Rich psychedelic patterns and colours were introduced into the rugs, and futuristic-looking models and lunar landscapes into the ads.
In his 1961 publication Scandinavian Design, Ulf Hård af Segerstad outlines the history of the rya rug. Dating from the 15th century, he explains, the first Scandinavian ryas were coarse, long-piled, heavy covers used by seal hunters and deep-sea fishermen instead of furs. Later the rugs became lighter and more ornamental, and in the 19th century were often splendid festive tapestries regarded as valuable articles of inheritance. By the mid-20th century the rya had become a sort of painting in textiles, says Segerstad, with the individual artist identifiable by the colours, patterns and techniques in much the same way that one identifies a painter's canvas. The rya bears witness, he concludes, like few other Scandinavian handicraft products, to a culture in which the cosy indoor warmth is a vitally important complement to an often severe climate. And still today, ryas are often displayed on a wall during the warmer summer months and taken down for use on the floor or even the bed during the cold Scandinavian winters.
It is the artistic nature of the design together with the deep and dense shag pile that characterises the mid to late 20th century rya. Ege's striking ryas of the 1960s and 1970s were machine-made to very high standards of quality in 100 per cent pure wool with a 2.5cm pile, with mothproofing and colourproofing to ensure that the rugs would have a long lifespan, and a 25-year guarantee to that effect. Their quality is reflected in the fact that some 10 to 15 years after the guarantee period a high proportion are still bright and intact. The standard size of a 60s Ege rya was 140 x 200cm, as illustrated above in a design entitled Sunrise and (top) in a midcentury-modern style of artwork entitled Savannah. A smaller Ege rya size was 70 x 110cm, as pictured above right in an example from Ege's Boutique range in a design called Abstracta, and there was also a less common supersize 250 x 360cm. Much less common again, and confined to the Ege de Luxe range, were the circular ryas with a diameter of 200cm (see right), and rarest of all were the magnificent and elusive 250cm diameter Ege de Luxe circular ryas.
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Ege Rya is a subsidiary brand of Denmark's largest and most prestigious carpet manufacturer Ege Taepper. Based at Herning in Jutland, Ege Taepper was set up in 1938 by Mads Eg Damgaard. The company flourished during the 1940s despite the shortages of raw materials associated with the second world war, by introducing products made from alternative materials such as paper-based fabrics. The company's expansion continued through the following decades and today, in addition to the parent company in Herning, there are Ege companies in the UK, Germany, France, Norway and Sweden, and Ege distributors around the world.
