To get to Duruelo de la Sierra from Barcelona, you have to take the AP-2 and not turn off until Zaragoza. Then take the AP-68, the highway that leads to Logroño, and turn south on the N-122, towards Soria. There is no longer a highway in this stretch, but the road is good, with not many curves or slopes. In Soria, the ring road is called SO-20 and the exit we are interested in is that of the N-234, westbound. Upon reaching Abejar, the CL-117 appears on the right, which already begins to resemble a stage of a mountain in the Vuelta Ciclista a España.
The road announces a detour to a place called Playa de Pita and then crosses a reservoir, the Cuerda del Pozo reservoir. In the eyes of the traveler, everything that is not water is a dark green mass, a mass of oaks and, above all, Iberian pines, pines from Soria and Segovia that are the kings of pines in Spain. The trucks coming in the opposite direction carry immense logs. Like in the credits of Twin Peaks.
There are four villages in this last stretch: Molinos de Duero, Salduero, Covaleda, and finally, Duruelo de la Sierra. The limit of the town is a small stream, barely a ribbon of water that a sign identifies as the Duero River. The ancient Dorus is born 7.2 kilometers to the north. We are at 1,240 meters above sea level and 499 kilometers from Barcelona, on the border between the provinces of Soria, La Rioja, and Burgos. In the heart of the timber industry in Spain.
The journey from Barcelona to Duruelo de la Sierra is important because it is the setting for the surprising case of the Barcelona Blind, a product that was designed 16 years ago as an exercise by two architecture students from the UB and that went from factory to factory across half of Spain for five years until it landed in the carpentry of the Altelarrea brothers, who had barely survived the arrival of Ikea and the collapse of the furniture industry in Soria. The brothers made pallets and beehives, more than anything else, and said, why not.
It would take another five years of trial and error, of modifying cutting and nailing machines, of opening and closing the angle of the hooks, of finding the exact wood and of finding the right moment when two or three coincidences worked in their favor. From 2020, the Barcelona blind became an unimaginable success that is now exported throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and Canada. "During the pandemic, from spending so much time at home, people became fond of seeing decoration images on social media. The blinds started to be talked about and things took off," says Pedro Altelarrea, one of the three carpenter brothers from Duruelo de la Sierra. "And that coincided with the ICO credits to overcome the standstill. That allowed us to invest with good financing... But before that, we went through very tough times."
Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea are the partners of the workshop that bears their names: "Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea Community of Goods, Duruelo de la Sierra, Soria." Vicente, their other brother, also works there with a son of Pedro who studies Chemistry in Burgos and works during holidays in the family business. There is another boy from the town that Pedro speaks highly of, and that's it. It doesn't seem like a lot of people for a production of 18,000 square meters of blinds per year, but in Duruelo there is no recent immigration, and it is not easy to find labor for the hard work of industrial carpentry.
The hands of the Altelarrea brothers are impressive, with their old cuts. "Also, it's very cold here, there are no orchards, and people get scared," says Pedro. Before the 2008 crisis, the town had 450 workers employed in the furniture industry, people who mainly made wooden kitchen furniture and had achieved some prosperity. "I remember taking a table to Madrid that cost 2,500 euros. All of that ended," says Pedro Altarrea. All of that ended, and from the furniture industry of Duruelo, only three or four carpentry workshops and a few professionals remained.
The raw material also remained. The wood of some centuries-old pines of extraordinary quality remained. And that is very important.
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"We didn't know anything about pines or woods in 2009, we had no family ties or experience," says Pau Sarquella, the architect who invented the Barcelona blind along with his partner Diana Usón. "In 2009, we were in fifth year and we came across an open competition for students organized by the Barcelona City Council and the FAD Foundation. It was called Public Corners and it was supposed to find places in the city that were in a state of neglect and then propose a solution. We focused on Malnom and Picalquers, alleys in the Raval, a dark, narrow, and poorly connected place with the rest of the neighborhood. We noticed that the neighbors hung their clothes on the balconies because the apartments were small and they didn't have space inside, and that gave a disorderly image. When it rained, they did what they could. Some put plastic over the clothes, and others unfolded the blinds over the clothes."
Surely many people recognize those blinds from their grandparents' house. Sarquella refers to the so-called Alicante blinds, those rolls of thin PVC or low-quality pine slats that are mainly manufactured in the furniture industries of Sax, Alicante (hence their name) and are sold in hardware stores since the 1960s. The Alicante blind is a cheap and efficient product, easy to install but not very durable. It was a good invention waiting for someone to give it a little twist and improve it.
Duruelo de la Sierra is where the factory that produces them is located
That's what Usón and Sarquella did: they designed a blind that was like the Alicante blind but without the defects of the Alicante blind. They slightly changed the shape of the slats so that water would not seep through, thus effectively isolating the clotheslines on the balconies of the Raval. They made sure that these same slats offered an intermediate position, half open, half closed, to function as a lattice and allow air and light to pass through without losing privacy. They created a prototype in a carpentry workshop in Banyoles and started moving it to larger workshops. No one felt capable of producing in series and with competitive costs the invention of Usón and Sarquella until someone took them to Duruelo. The best pine on the market was supposed to come from that region. If someone could understand what the Barcelona architects needed, they had to be there.
The Altelarrea brothers were carpenters and sons of a carpenter. They had inherited the turning trade, the most sophisticated of those related to wood, and had bought a workshop to be self-employed, but they were in the survival economy that the entire construction sector in Spain entered. "What convinced us about the blind? We had to move, to try something. In this region, there was a lot of conformism, and that's also why the industry collapsed," says Pedro Altelarrea in Duruelo. "Pau and Diana offered us to go into business with them and with a company from Girona, Sumace, who are the ones who find the clients and finish the product for them. Seeing that they took risks was an incentive, a reason to trust. But we had to make a strong investment."
In the family workshop, there are six machines working on making slats: the optimizer, the molding machine, two additional sawing machines, a nailer, and a hook-making unit. Only the optimizer belongs to the digital world. The other machines are, how can I put it?, antiques from the 1960s that passed through other carpentry workshops and that the Altelarreas have modified like violins until they found the perfect process for the slats of the Barcelona blinds.
"The machines are beautiful, old. And I think it's very nice how they've been calibrating them for years until they achieved efficient work," says Sarquella. "Their project was demanding: we improved the rope, we stipulated that the wood had to be from Soria, and that the paint had to be high-quality, a German paint. We invented a color range to bring the blinds to market, inspired by the modernist buildings of Barcelona." There's a Batlló green, a Vicens beige... That's why we called the blinds Barcelona, which is also a good name for exporting. And we managed to offer reasonable prices. The product has become more expensive because wood has become more expensive, but it's not a luxury product. It's found in many social housing developments." Today, the Barcelona blinds' online store sells per square meter for ¤79.86. 50% more than what Alicante blinds cost.
"We presented the blinds at [the home decor store] Vinçon in 2015, and they really liked them. They initially asked us to use them for private homes. The image started to circulate, and we started getting clients who were developers," Sarquella recalls. After the pandemic, the buzz became unstoppable. Orders poured in from the Netherlands, Portugal, France, Hong Kong, Canada, Switzerland, and the FAD awards, and Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea's carpentry business doubled its production year after year. "We're already at the limit of our capacity," says Pedro Altelarrea.
What if an investment fund invested two million in the carpentry business and allowed them to continue growing? "I'd be delighted to hear about it, but I'm a little skeptical. We've developed these machines year after year. The labor force isn't there. And we have another limit: raw materials."
Altelarrea takes the car and drives to the neighboring village of Vilviestre del Pinar, where their sawnwood supplier is located. Miguel Vicente, the sawmill owner, shows what makes Soria pine such a treasure. The trees are felled when they are one hundred years old, so their grain is very fine and knot-free. That's why it's classified as "exceptional quality." Atlantic pine, on the other hand, doesn't have such a fine texture, so it's used for structural purposes. And is there enough century-old pine of exceptional quality? There's plenty, and year after year, the reforested area exceeds the harvested area, but demand is also growing rapidly. The consortium formed by the Altelarrea brothers and their Catalan partners has a long-term contract that allows them access to preferential prices. "If there were a forest fire, we would be in a very bad situation. But these forests are communally owned. Communal forests don't burn like private ones," says the carpenter.
Why do you think people buy these blinds? "Because it's very beautiful, I wouldn't give it much more thought," Altelarrea replies. Sarquella explains that her product has already been used in many different ways: as interior cladding, to divide spaces in large warehouses, as pergolas, as technical ceilings... "But I agree with Pedro: we came up with a beautiful object. Not luxurious, but beautiful."