Maria Escandell restores old furniture, runs workshops, teaches her neighbors and, at any given moment, takes the time to repair a chair simply for the sheer pleasure of it. She began her journey as a craftswoman 15 years ago, when her husband Joan, a carpenter by trade, would go through stretches without assistants and needed someone to finish the wooden chairs he designed. That’s when the Ibizan, who had been an Adlib fashion designer, swapped fabrics for natural fibers such as hemp, esparto and jute, which she would handle for hours in the workshop the couple still keeps in the basement of their home in Ibiza.
For Escandell, inspiration has almost always come unexpectedly, like during a trip to Menorca when she saw a woven pattern at the Cova d’en Xoroi that she recreated once she got home. “I started with a four-by-four square pattern, very simple,” she says. “It was the same one my husband began with too, and I spent more than two years doing just that because I didn’t know how to do anything else.” Over time, she trained her eye and started observing people’s chairs to copy their designs.
She learned by doing and undoing, because some models were complicated. And that’s how she trained her hands, through trial and error, gradually perfecting her craft. Meanwhile, her husband worked with bulrush, pine and all kinds of wood sourced from various local suppliers to build the structures. There were times when she could make a hundred seats in a short period of time. “No carpenter wants to make chairs because they’re the most labor-intensive thing to build,” she says. “There are so many measurements and you have to adjust each machine for each piece.”
They sold them at the island’s markets, such as the medieval one, where people, especially foreigners, would stop and admire the handmade work, lovingly and carefully crafted. But most of their sales came through custom orders from individuals or even local restaurants, and they would sometimes turn out batches of 30 or 40 chairs all at once. When Joan retired, she turned the work into a hobby. “I kept going to a few markets, like the one in Santa Gertrudis, and they invited me to Sant Josep and Sant Rafel.”
But now Maria Escandell works in slow motion. When someone doesn’t want a chair anymore, she sometimes glues it back together and revamps it with a design from memory. She also occasionally gives workshops, which she has held in Jesús and at the Molí d’en Simó (Sant Antoni), among other locations. She’s even taught one of her neighbors how to weave. “He said to me, ‘Maria, I’ll come one day, sit next to you and you’ll teach me.’ And within a short while, he had it down.”
Giving a second life to furniture from friends or family is now her passion. The oldest piece is a nearly 100-year-old chair her sister-in-law was going to throw away, and whose life, thanks to her skill, has been extended.
