Meet Claire McGovern, founder of Rhyme Studio
Discover Irish grown wool in it's most luxurious form
In Irish farmhouses, there is a blending of inside and outside.
Think paw-prints of healthy soil in hallways, fresh potatoes in the oven, wool jumpers next to the skin.
The sterility of city life, though somewhat mitigated by parks and cocktails, is deeply unsettling on a biological level.
Take New York, for example.
In 2020, the gilded city of connection became a haven of separation.
With the new disconnection came a desire for wellness focused interior design.
Originally associated with spas & hotels, this rapidly expanding niche uses natural fibres, muted colours and natural light to create environments that, simply put, feel good.
Meet Claire McGovern.
Claire is an interior designer, curator and art advisor.
Born and educated in Dublin, Claire tucked her Master's degree in art history and administration under her wing and flew to San Francisco to work in art galleries.
After curating exhibitions of contemporary Irish art & design, a serendipitous meeting led to an interior design career. As her client roster expanded, Claire moved to NYC and founded Rhyme Studio, a multi-disciplinary design manufacturer and fine art advisory.
Designed in Brooklyn and handcrafted in Ireland using Irish wool, the rugs & tapestries offered by Rhyme Studio are extraordinary.
My name is Dr Aoife Long and I write weekly articles about the slow fashion scene in Ireland. Sometimes it’s an interview with an Irish designer, sometimes it’s an essay on history of textiles and the people who made them.
In Ireland, there is a story under every stone and an artist under every rock. I fully expect the internet to disappear before I run out of stories.
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While producing Irish art and design shows in California, Claire realised the need for a more contemporary view of her native land; the Ireland of John Ford had all but disappeared.
‘Frankly I didn't see contemporary Irish craftsmanship being represented at all on the international stage. So that was the impetus for developing our own design collections, beginning with Irish wool carpet & tapestry, to celebrate not only sustainable design but high quality Irish craftsmanship.’
When Claire began to explore the production of rugs in 2017, the sorry state of the Irish Wool industry tumbled, skeleton like, out of the closet.
An Irish rug producer with 35 years experience had never used Irish wool. Mills were producing iconic Irish woollen goods with Australian wool. Irish farmers were dumping or burning fleeces in an attempt to get rid of the annual clip.
Sounds dire, doesn’t it?
Most designers would have turned on their heels and found an easier source of material, but Claire was undeterred.
Instead, Claire built her own supply chain.
She began to source Galway wool fleeces directly from Connemara farms. The raw wool was then processed by Kerry Woollen Mills and dyed by Cushendale Woollen Mill in Co. Kilkenny. The rugs were (and still are) handcrafted in Co. Wicklow, before being shipped to Europe & the US for distribution.
And then in 2020, the Galway Wool Co-Op burst on to the scene and a supply chain from farmer to mill emerged. Rhyme Studio is now offering the Bainin collection, featuring the distinctive naturally coloured Galway wool processed by Donegal Yarns.
It is a bold move to tread a new path, but with risk, comes reward.
In establishing her own supply chain, Claire has created luxury products with an enviable traceability. Lead times are competitive and in terms of longevity, Claire is confident that the durability of Irish wool will equal or exceed that of merino. Logic would suggest the higher the micron count, the more hard wearing the rug.
In addition to the practical and aesthetic advantages, wool has an impressive number of environmental specifications; the biodegradable and anti-microbial qualities of wool are well established. Already a member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council USA, Rhyme Studio is currently conducting research to demonstrate the air purification qualities of wool rugs.
From industry panels to governmental committees, Claire is a tireless campaigner for the use of wool in sustainable design.
‘In 2020, Blatnaid Gallagher, Chris Weiniger from Donegal Yarns and I (as the only design studio that seemed to be interested) were appointed to a committee convening upon the issue of the Irish wool market collapse. Obviously the world was soon consumed with other items; the collapse of the wool market was not at the top of anyone's agenda.
The reality is that Galway wool will survive, but the rest of the Irish wool industry needs support. It is really a governmental issue at this point. Under European Union legislation, wool is still classified as a waste byproduct. That needs to shift.
The collapse of the Irish wool industry is mirrored all around the world; sheep farmers in Britain, Canada and even New Zealand receive mere cents per kg of fleece. Of the 2 million tonnes of wool produced each year globally, 80-90% is used in apparel & home furnishings; the remainder is used for industrial purposes. Australian & New Zealand Merino wool production dominates, due to the high annual wool yield per animal and the low micron count.
Historically, one of the most prized trading commodities in the world, wool now accounts for just 3% of the global textile market share.
Overseas promotion is an important part of the Irish wool puzzle.
Since launching in 2018, Rhyme Studio has created five collections of customizable ‘sculptural Irish wool rugs and tapestries’. With prices from $1,900 for a 3’ square rug to $25,600 for 12’ x 15’ rug (the studio offers a trade discount program), these rugs are an investment not only in your space, but also in who you aspire to be.
Rhyme’s designs are the perfect introduction to the luxurious warmth of organic fibres in earthy colours. The higher the price tag, the less neons, it seems. Wool has the native ability to humanise official buildings and grand residences; it’s not surprising that the Irish wool collections have proved popular with affluent Irish consumers based in Ireland or America.
The majority of sales, however, are interior designers reselling to their clients. When Rhyme exhibited Irish wool rugs at the 2021 New York Design Week, interior designers were receptive but totally unfamiliar with Irish Wool (which is a bit curious, given that Ireland exports 10 million kg of wool each year to make carpets).
Claire now finds herself among a select group of upmarket interior designers who are joining the multi-billion dollar wellness industry. A renewed interest in natural fibres is, at this stage, inevitable; the wool carpet industry is projected to grow significantly in the next 10 years.
‘My studio is reinventing the wheel; we are celebrating Irish craftsmanship while making something that's truly sustainable. But we're also presenting a product that has been completely rejected by the international carpet industry.’
Claire has concluded that, in order to be worth making, a design must have a great story behind it.
Mixing traditional motifs with non-traditional rug shapes, Rhyme’s designs are visually striking and highly unique. Inspiration for the collections range from 7th century Irish Christian art to 20th century Ukrainian avant-garde painter, Kasimir Malevich.
Some of Rhyme’s most popular designs are Infinity from The Trinity Series and also the evocatively named Heal, is (and I quote Rhyme’s Instagram caption) ‘inspired by the geometric purity and meaning of the woven cross of rushes associated with St. Brigid's Day on February 1st’.
In a totally non-Christian way, of course.
‘I'm fairly certain it was a pagan symbol, you know, before Christianity even existed, but it's just such a beautiful form. We have a couple of clients who love this design. It seems to align with modernist architecture.’
Ancient shapes remain pleasing to modern eyes; this particular design has found homes in places as varied as open plan California houses to stylish New York bars and even Claire’s own apartment. Perhaps as a testament to the enduring power of the symbols, Christian motifs are now being absorbed into modern design, just as Christianity syncretized Pagan symbols, festivals and traditions.
Slow fashion thrives in reality; so does interior design.
The deep, rich colours of Rhyme’s wool rugs are difficult to capture, even with professional photographic lighting. There are few industries in which accurate colour reproduction is of greater importance. In short, these rugs need to be seen in real life; none more so than Rhyme’s debut collection.
Inspired by Insular art, the collection titled ‘Insula’ was launched in NYC in 2018; Celtic symbols of life and death snaked through rich greens and blues. Meaning island, the word insula may also refer to the insular cortex within the human brain, which responds to beautiful images.
How appropriate.
Born to an architect and a poet, Claire’s design language is a striking combination of image and word.
‘The neuroaesthetics of design is a growing discipline. Last summer, we created a custom staircase installation for a French interior designer client. The Irish wool runners spelt out Sláinte & Fáilte in Ogham. Wellness in interior design is not limited to the quality of the product or the material.’
‘The words we use become the house we live in’.’
If you are unfamiliar with Ogham, it is not a language in itself, but rather a written form of Primitive Irish. The majority of the surviving examples of Ogham are found on standing stones in Cork and Kerry in the South of Ireland. Dating from 4th-9th century, these stones marked territory, a fact which has not stopped many from being tattooed with the early medieval equivalent of Kilroy was here. Small wonder, really. The ancient alphabet awakens something buried deeply within our epigenetics.
Though Rhyme offers fully customisable rugs or tapestries which can spell almost any word in ogham, the OM collection contains standard options featuring the words peace, welcome, health and shelter. Other standard options include the words birch, rowan, alder and willow on a striking backdrop of deep brown undyed Zwartbles wool.
Why the tree names, you may ask.
According to various medieval texts, the names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters of Ogham and therefore, ogham is sometimes known as the Celtic tree alphabet. The accuracy of this is anyone’s guess; no marketer is going to argue with such a poetic story.
But Claire is refreshingly transparent about the origin of stories, the tallest of which must be the widely accepted history of the Aran sweater.
In the 1930s, the lore of Aran sweaters captivated the world. Lovingly knitted by wives, the family-specific designs were used to identify the bodies of drowned fishermen washed up on the beach… or so the story went.
Clan patterns were, of course, a complete fiction, as were the meanings attributed to Aran stitches. After a visit to a Dublin gift shop in 1938, a German gentleman named Heinz Keiwe wrote an article about the Aran sweater. Heinz had never travelled to the Aran Islands nor had he ever met an Aran knitter, but he preceded to invent meanings for the most common Aran stitches.
No one contradicted him; in fact, the sellers of Aran knitwear hopped merrily on the bandwagon and added to the marketing myth. The story was so oft repeated on labels and brochures, it became part of the oral history of the Aran sweater.
‘Then, of course, in the 1960s, the fashion industry decided that the original Aran sweater yarn (made from genuine Galway wool) was too scratchy for the skin. So Irish companies could only make Aran sweaters with merino wool from 1960s & 70s onwards.’
Just like the fashion industry, the interior design industry has a loose relationship with the truth.
Claire has strong words for the decidedly unsustainable labour and environmental practices of the current industry.
‘Just like fast fashion, there is a version of fast carpets or fast furniture. In the past 40 years, American companies sadly allowed so much manufacturing to move overseas, in order to become more price competitive. The furniture industry has been no different. Most of the major US & European furniture companies manufacture in China and Indonesia. Many Western based carpet companies retain high profits with factories in India & Nepal that do not pay Western wages. There are of course a few exceptions such as Italian furniture companies - a country where the tradition of manufacturing has remained strong; design is after all in their DNA.’
However damaging the manufacturing process may be, we know for sure that home. interiors frequently contain toxic fire retardants and anti-stain chemicals. According to the Green Science Policy Institute, flame retardants continually migrate out of furniture and into indoor dust which is ingested by people and pets. Some of these chemicals are associated with lowered IQ in children, cancer, hormone disruption, and other health problems. 10 million tonnes of furniture head to landfills each year in the US alone; PFAs don’t follow the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ rule.
The importance of sustainable interior design cannot be overstated.
A renewed interest in natural fibres is, at this stage of hypochondria, inevitable; the wool carpet industry is projected to grow significantly in the next 10 years. Credit must be given to Rhyme Studio for using natural latex backing on their carpets and organic natural foam fillings in their range of bolsters and cushions. Claire is aiming to use Irish Wool fillings in the near future, which would, once again, require a new supply chain.
(In this case, domestic consumers have an advantage; inter-family supply chains are surprisingly easy to establish. If you would like to replace your dubious cushion and sofa fillings, get a few fleeces from a local sheep farmer and wash & dry them. Might as well put that scorching sun to good use.)
Rhyme Studio also offers a fine art advisory service.
In addition to the Irish wool rugs, Rhyme Studio curates an impressive selection of other artists’ work, including paintings by the Canadian storm chaser, Ian Sheldon and pieces by the Irish sculptress, Helen O’Connell.
‘I’ve known Helen for years. Her work is incredible. I think she's one of the most interesting sculptors in Ireland. There is something unequalled about having a stone which is millions of years old in your interior. I think the hallmark of any sustainably designed interior is surrounding yourself with materials which are not only healthy, but timeless.’
Helen works with all types of stone; several of the pieces we have in stock in NY are Kilkenny limestone. She's constantly uncovering fossils as she chips away.’
While it is anyone’s guess how those ancient animals saw the sunset, we do know their modern descendants have a far greater perception of reds, greens and blues than humans.
Maybe that’s why big fish like Rhyme Studio’s rugs so much.
Please visit Rhyme studio’s website here.
Dr Aoife Long is a fashion writer and a creative director at Spirit and Luxury.
PS.
There are just 25 copies left of the first edition of the Slow Fashion magazine, (which will probably sell out over the weekend).
Order today for just €16/ $17 + free worldwide shipping.
Absolutely love Rhyme Studio's rugs, great to learn about Claire and the work!