Villa: Craft and Design
"Villa reflects my love for historic craftsmanship and organic materials combined with a modern expression and my own design. I am inspired by the warmth and culture of the South and the abundance of original craftsmanship I find in the countries just south of the Mediterranean. Join me on my creative journey over the last 24 years". (Helle Fog)
The sun's strong rays are kept out by the clay-lined walls of the low building. In the twilight, Nourredine sits bent over the turntable. His feet are nowhere to be seen, they have disappeared into the cool hole in the floor under the turntable that spins at high speed. A pillar grows out of Nourredine's hands, soon transforming into a giant clay body that reaches up to the height of his face.
Outside, under the burning sun, jars are piled up by the thousands. I am on my way to hand-pick the most beautiful models.
Under the simplest of conditions, traditional crafts are maintained around the world - today, however, often outside our industrialized pastures. But for centuries we have also in Europe loved these crafts and built our well-being, our way of life and ideals of beauty owing to the skills of skilled craftsmen and artisans.
Personally, I can think of nothing more beautiful than when the unique goes hand in hand with organic materials and is completed as practical items for the home. Precisely that combination has always been the common thread in my work since I started the adventure with Villa in 2001.
Leather tanning in Fez, Morocco 2015
Voyage of discovery
Originally, the idea was to search in Southern Europe for Mediterranean handicrafts and make it the basis of the business. After a three-month journey through Turkey, Greece, Italy and Portugal, where I had to admit that the historic handicraft was dying out - or at best was only something for the very rich, I found myself in Tunisia. Tunis and the northern part of Tunisia around Cap Bon have a strong culture handed down from the Roman Empire. It was an eye-opener. More than 20 years ago, the historic crafts and handicrafts were alive and well in parallel with industrialization, which at the time already had a good hold in the North African country.
The first collections were thus born from the crafts available in the country. This resulted in dinnerware of hand-painted ceramics, beautiful hand-turned Roman jars and a large collection of olive wood kitchenware.
Olivewood bowl, made in Tunesia, Villa Cucina line 2007
The Roman legacy
In the shadow of the Roman amphitheater in El Djem, I discovered mosaics that I had otherwise only seen in Pompeii. The only difference was that now the Roman mosaic, beaten in tiny marble cubes, could be integrated as the most beautiful pictures and patterns in a marble table-top.
It became the first table series, which quickly developed into a range of garden furniture.
However, the close relationship between Tunisia and Europe was not only due to the Romans, but also to a particular extent to the French who ruled the country in the first half of the 20th century. This cultural heritage made a strong impression – not only linguistically, but also in terms of taste.
But the influence of the French had had a great influence throughout western North Africa and a country like Morocco suddenly seemed to be even more exciting, as a supplier of historical craftsmanship. It turned out that the Moroccans had maintained the old handicraft virtues to an even higher degree than the Tunisians.
Marble table with inlayed roman mosaic, handwrought iron chairs, Angelique, Villa 2011
Morocco – a melting pot of creativity
The first trip to Morocco was an overwhelming sensory bombardment, showing a cornucopia of arts and crafts. Especially Marrakesh revealed itself as a city where the craft traditions of the last 1000 years are still maintained. Here, several worlds flow together in a conglomerate of Morocco's own traditional crafts - from their Berber ancestry through Arab influence further on to European craftsmanship, which today is often forgotten here in Europe.
The collection grew, up through the 2000's, as I explored different arts and crafts and soon Villa could offer hundreds of handmade items for interior or outside usage or decoration.
A hotel in the coutry side near Marrakesh 2013
Design and development
The many crafts that were suddenly available not only sparked the development of an interesting collection of sustainable and beautiful utility items, but also developed my own creativity. In collaboration with skilled craftsmen, more and more interior items of my own design appeared at the end of the 2000's. It inspired me to take the development a step further to furniture. First it became small furniture in leather, wood and wrought iron. But relatively quickly it turned into a larger collection of wrought iron and mosaic garden furniture. The furniture series "Nordic" by my hand was introduced to the European market and managed to be specially selected at the Interior fair in Milan 2009 thanks to the new way of combining materials, in a style that goes across cultures. This meant that a Nordic coffee table was exhibited at the design museum Triennale in Milan, which was a great honor and gave further impetus to Villa´s design development.
Nordic outdoor furniture line, Spoga fair Cologne 2014
Marrakesh – Europe's workshop
With more than 10 years of collaboration with craftsmen in Marrakesh, we had built our own workshop for wrought iron and mosaics at the beginning of the 2010s and hired a coordinator to manage all production, packaging and shipping of articles and furniture to the warehouse in Svendborg. The table series did well in the early 2010s and we worked more and more with tiles, mosaics and wrought iron as elements in the furniture series. Until then, we had only used the original Moroccan Zellige tiles for furniture production, but then I discovered the European hand-made cement tiles that the French had brought to Morocco 100 years earlier.
It was the start of a new adventure with tile production following the old craft technique for cement tiles in two-layer technique, which had been invented in Central Europe in the middle of the 1800s. The tile type had its heyday around 1900 up till 30 years later, when the curling patterns of the Art Nouveau era were state-of-the-art. Many of the patterns from those days were and are still in production and as Morocco, with the annexation of the French, had come to constitute the workshop of Europe, they were also to be found in large numbers in the tile workshops of Marrakesh. It was therefore easy to use as a starting point.
The interesting thing to me however, is not to imitate past times or other people's products, but to create myself. New Nordic colors for the tiles were quickly developed in close collaboration with a working community around a group of tile craftsmen - and in the late 2010s the ambitions moved on to the development of new tile shapes and patterns. I changed and further developed the technical tile production around 2020 into outdoor tiles, coved and curved tiles and anti-slip tiles. As the tile types have not been seen before within handmade cement tiles in the two-layer technique, these new shapes and tile types were soon patented as new models.
Right outside the gates of Marrakesh, the handmade jars are getting ready for shipment to Denmark, 2022
Culture, sustainability and environment
For more than 20 years, under the name of my brand Villa, I have created countless new articles, furniture and tiles in collaboration with skilled craftsmen south of the Mediterranean. This meeting of several cultures is not only creatively inspiring for me but is a pillar in my understanding of the global community across borders. Experiencing how precisely the interaction and respect for each other forms the background and is a driving force in the creation of new paths within design and the preservation of old craftsmanship strengthens my motivation to develop Villa's world.
As a natural part of my work at Villa, the UN Global Goals have been a backdrop that has always been there but has never been the actual cause. As an obvious parameter, which for me is mostly about respect – the values, reflected in the Global Goals, are part of Villa's DNA. It's about respect for people, for cultures, for the environment - in short, for the world we live in.
Thus, sustainability has also been a companion in everything I do. Whether it is about environmental solutions such as recycling, low consumption of the planet's resources, consideration for employees and business partners - or whether it has been about building my company domicile on the island of Tåsinge as a close to 0 energy concept: Sustainability is Villa's evident base.
Helle Fog
Owner and founder of Villa
Tåsinge, November 2024
Villa tile exhibition, Tåsinge 2024
Company domicile, Tåsinge 2019
Villa garden furniture exhibition, Tåsinge 2012
A bakery in Copenhagen with patterned tiles from Villa
A rooftop bar in Copenhagen with Villa zellige tiles
A private home in Denmark with Villa retro design tiles
A private bathroom with Villa herringbone tiles
