Chic Rugmaker Beni is Making the Jump from Digital to the Real World in Style

Beni co-founders Robert Wright and Tiberio Lobo-Navia are returning to New York with a chic showroom concept to show off their modernist reinterpretations of traditional Maroccan rugs.

Beni's New York Apartment is the brand's first physical space.

In a sun-washed, European-salon style studio apartment at the garden end of a Greenwich Village townhouse, Robert Wright and Tiberio Lobo-Navia are settling in. Former New Yorkers, the pair relinquished cross-atlantic living during the pandemic, giving up the Brooklyn life to relocate to Marrakesh to focus on their artisanal rug brand, Beni, fulltime.

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Beni Co-founders Robert Wright and Tiberio Lobo-Navia.

Founded in 2018 after discovering the work of Berber artisans in Morocco's Atlas Mountains—and an overall frustration with the rug-buying process in general—Beni is a contemporary atelier that enlivens local weaving techniques with a globalist vision. "We wanted to be respectful and preserve their art but update the process," Wright tells L'OFFICIEL, explaining the difficulties of finding the centuries-old rugs previously, which were made at varying frequencies and sizes based on the whims of the craftspeople.

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Berber traditions of harvesting, rinsing, and cleaning natural wool that Beni has incorporated into its design process.

Beginning with six looms and 12 weavers, who hand-wove natural wool rinsed in the Oum Er-Rbia River that was dyed with natural pigments derived from North African herbs and dried in the mountain air, the duo set up shop first as a virtual house where users could customize modernist iterations of the 10,000-year-old processes online. "When we were looking for rugs [before Beni], we realized that shoppers had to compromise in some way—whether it was size or color or something else," says Lobo-Navia. "We wanted that to be part of the process but we didn't want to overwhelm people." Debuting with ten color options, and a variety of textile designs—not only inspired by Morocco's heritage but also Brazilian modernism and Bauhaus—as well as now the options to have tassels, users have the potential to create over 100 combinations in both knotted and flat weave. "The whole process feels very special," says Wright, adding that whether a rug is customized or ordered from the brand's standardized collection, each piece is made-to-order by hand, meaning no two rugs are exactly alike.

Three years later, Beni has become a design-favorite in the world of style, with everyone from interior artists to fashion designers turning to the house for their textiles. (It doesn't hurt that apart from their library, the duo make wholly custom pieces, too.) Today their operation has grown to include over 390 aristians and 215 looms, and their return to New York is part of the brand's next chapter.

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Inside Beni's apartment located at 13 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, New York.

Opening later this month, Beni's New York apartment will be its first physical presence, allowing visitors to finally touch and feel the rugs in real life just as the world itself reopens. "It really helps to see the rugs in a livable space that speaks to our aesthetics and beliefs," says Lobo-Navia, motioning to a locally-produced light pendant that the two brought back from Morroco. "In the last three years we've become masters at shipping," jokes Wright, who says that the space was imagined to be a spin on a sample showroom. It was designed alongside interior stylist Colin King, whom Beni released its first capsule collection with last fall. Titled The Shape of Color, the collaboration was inspired by the likes of artists Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, and Barnett Newman, and added a jolt of warm saturation to the brand's contemporary catalogue.

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From The Shape of Color, Beni's collaboration with Colin King.

Towards the back of the white-floored, New York apartment sits an olive tree, a symbol of foliage from home that will also live in Beni's new base in Tameslouht, which is about a 20 minute drive from Marrakesh. The duo didn't plan to open two spaces at once, of course, but such was the situation they found themselves in due of the pandemic. The large property will become Beni's new headquarters, expanding upon its Atlas Mountains operations to include end-to-end production, a rug showroom, and a creative studio. The tree and the rugs aren't the only shared commonalities, though. "We're very big into coffee," says Lobo-Navia, referring to their Milan-style espresso bar in progress in Morocco and an impressive in-house stock in Greenwich Village. "This year we'll be drinking lots of coffee!"