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It was October 2014 and we still hadn’t decided where we would build our new lives together and this new textile business we were dreaming about. We were talking to a friend about ‘cloth & clay’ and what we were looking for in a new home, and a place to slowly build a new business from scratch. He said ‘Well, if you like Berlin but crave the sun, why are you not going to Barcelona?’ So we picked up our bag (we had been traveling light around the world and had very few belongings!!) and went to Barcelona.

We loved our month in Barcelona and especially the seedy neighborhood of El Raval where we lived in a 4th floor walk-up. We enrolled in language school so Thomas could learn Spanish and so I could brush up on what I had learned back in high school. But something was missing. Barcelona felt like a great place to visit, but we didn’t love living there. For me (Melissa), I felt like to live in a big city, why wouldn’t we just return to New York? So, we decided that Barcelona would not be our forever home, but Spain felt right. With a basic grasp on the language, a good feeling for how generous and open the people were, and a hope for what running a business could look like in this country…..we set about finding another place to live. That brought us to Javea, and the home of Carlos & Sandra…

Carlos holds a special place in Thomas’s heart because he was the first person who took a chance on him when he’d first arrived in the United States from Germany back in the early 90s. Barely speaking English, Thomas was a talented graphic designer and Carlos saw that potential, so hired him and they worked together in various capacities over the years. So when we heard Carlos and his wife moved their family from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Javea, we were curious what their life was like there. So we arrived with our one bag and camped out with them for a week, hiking, eating, exploring and figuring out if this part of Alicante could be our next home.

Needless to say, we didn’t end up living down the street from Carlos & Sandra, because of course now we’re in Mallorca. We loved being with their family, but unfortunately we were there in November after all the tourist energy had gone, and the area didn’t feel like the right kind of year-round living we were looking for. So, we decided to hop on over to the Balearic islands to see what they were all about. Of course every German knows about Mallorca because it’s basically considered the 17th state of Germany, but as an American, I (Melissa) had never really heard of it. We rented an apartment in the Santa Catalina neighborhood of Palma and even though it was winter, there was a super nice energy and year-round vibe to it. And, we never left!! (well, that’s not really totally true, but for purposes of getting on with it, we’ll hop to the good parts!)

The woman from whom we rented a charming little apartment in Santa Catalina ended up becoming a huge resource & friend. We told Natalia about our idea for this small business we hoped to one day launch, and she showed us some of the beautiful vintage textiles that she’d been collecting over the years at the island’s most famous fleamarket, Consell. We went there on a Sunday morning and found what she’d been talking about: drap, the Mallorcan word for the island’s most prized linen & hemp creation which had been loomed on the island generations ago, and used as bedcovers and curtains in all the old country homes. We loved its texture, its weave, its worn-through look and knew we had just landed one of the most important parts of what would soon become espanyolet.

While we had worked months on mixing what would become our signature espanyolet colors, we hadn’t actually found the perfect fabric on which to paint it. So now we had it in drap, and now we felt like the raw elements of espanyolet were coming together: we had found a beautiful place to live, we had the drive to start dyeing again and we had found a local & heirloom material that took our colors so beautifully. The next step was to build a studio to see if we could start executing against all of these disparate pieces which seemingly were coming together so beautifully.

We rented a small apartment in the Son Espanyolet neighborhood of Palma, just a 5 minute walk up the hill from where we’d been staying in Santa Catalina. It was very small and very modest: the best kind of place to take a chance on when you don’t know if this business idea will sink or swim. We built a painting table which took up 85% of the main room; there was just a small walkway between it and the 4 walls. Adjacent was a small bedroom which we turned into a sewing room and storage space. And of course one of the most important areas was the kitchen which we converted into a dye station. It was here that we housed all our potions, bits & bobbles, dyes and tools to create our signature paintable dye mixture. Off the kitchen was a small terrace for washing all the dye out and for drying fabrics after they’d been scoured. And so with nearly everything seemingly in place, we started buying up all the drap we could and perfecting our espanyolet color palette.