Wool House¶

5 Ws who, what, when, where, why¶

who¶

The Wool House is developed by a designer-researcher whose practice is rooted in material exploration, territorial narratives, and memory. The project is deeply connected to a family-owned sheep farm in the Basque Country (France) and focuses on Manech sheep wool, a local, underutilized, and often discarded resource. The work stands at the intersection of design, craft, and material research, engaging with pastoral knowledge, industrial decline, and contemporary fabrication tools.

what¶

The Wool House is a material research project that rethinks the future of coarse, non-spinnable wool through alternative transformation processes. Instead of yarn-based textile production, the project explores needle felting, bio-based binders (gelatin, sodium alginate), molding techniques, and digitally fabricated tools to create textile surfaces, composites, and volumetric forms. These experiments culminate in a speculative domestic environment composed entirely of wool-based elements.

when¶

The project unfolds over an extended research timeline, beginning with long-term material investigations prior to Fabricademy and intensifying during the program. It is structured in three phases :

Material experimentation and research.
Process refinement and technical development.
Design and fabrication of speculative objects forming the final installation.

where¶

The project is anchored in multiple locations :

The family sheep farm in the Basque Country, where the wool is sourced.
The Niaux spinning mill in Ariège, one of the last facilities in France capable of washing and carding wool.
Fabricademy labs and fablabs (including Green Fabric), where experimentation, prototyping, and documentation take place.

The final work materializes as a conceptual space called The Wool House—a fictional yet tangible domestic environment.

why¶

The Wool House responds to the disappearance of wool valorization channels in France and questions our reliance on industrial, non-renewable materials in domestic spaces. By transforming an overlooked vernacular resource into a contemporary material system, the project seeks to preserve local knowledge, reduce waste, and imagine alternative futures for textile-based living environments. It proposes wool not only as a textile, but as a structural, insulating, and poetic material capable of carrying memory while shaping sustainable futures.