The unusual success of the 'made in Soria' blinds that are in demand around the world: "During the pandemic, they started to circulate from ear to ear and things really took off."

To get to Duruelo de la Sierra from Barcelona, take the AP-2 and continue straight to Zaragoza. Then, take the AP-68, the highway that leads to Logroño, and turn south onto the N-122, toward Soria. There is no longer a highway on this stretch, but the road is good, with few curves or uneven surfaces. In Soria, the ring road is called the SO-20, and the exit we're interested in is the N-234, heading west. Upon reaching Abejar, the CL-117 appears on the right, which is already beginning to look like the setting for a mountain stage of the Vuelta a España. The road announces a detour to a place called Playa de Pita and then crosses a reservoir, the Cuesta del Pozo Reservoir. In the traveler's eyes, everything that isn't water is a dark green mass, a massif of oaks and, above all, Iberian pines, Soria and Segovia pines, the kings of pines in Spain. The trucks that appear coming in the opposite direction are loaded with immense logs, just like in the credits of Twin Peaks. There are four towns on that last stretch: Molinos de Duero, Salduero, Covaleda, and, finally, Duruelo de la Sierra. The edge of the town is a small channel, barely a ribbon of water that a sign identifies as the Duero River. The old Dorus rises 7.2 kilometers to the north. We are 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 Spain's timber industry .

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 designed 16 years ago as an exercise by two architecture students from the University of Barcelona (UB) and which traveled from factory to factory across Spain for five years until it ended up in the carpentry shop of the Altelarreas, brothers who had barely survived the arrival of IKEA and the collapse of the furniture industry in Soria. The brothers made pallets and bee hives more than anything else, and they decided, why not? It would take another five years of trial and error, modifying cutting and nailing machines, opening and closing the angle of the hooks, searching for the exact wood, and finding the right moment when two or three coincidences would work in their favor. Starting in 2020, the Barcelona Blind became an unimaginable success that is now exported throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and Canada. "During the pandemic, with so much time at home, people became addicted to looking at decorating images on social media. The blinds started circulating from ear to ear, and things really took off," says Pedro Altelarrea, one of three carpenter brothers from Duruelo de la Sierra. "And that coincided with the ICO loans to overcome the downturn. That allowed us to invest with good financing... But before that, we had a tough time."

Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea are the partners of the workshop that bears their name: "Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea Community of Goods, Duruelo de la Sierra, Soria." Vicente, their other brother, also works there with Pedro's son, who is studying Chemistry in Burgos and who works in the family business during vacations. There's another kid from the village whom Pedro speaks highly of, and that's it. It doesn't seem like a lot of people to produce 18,000 meters of blinds a year, but there's no recent immigration to Duruelo, and it's not easy to find labor for the hard work of industrial carpentry. The Altelarrea brothers' hands are impressive, with their old cuts. "Besides, it's very cold here, there are no gardens, and people get scared," says Pedro. Before the 2008 crisis, the village had 450 workers employed in the furniture industry, people who made, above all, wooden kitchen cabinets and who had achieved a certain prosperity . "I remember bringing a table to Madrid that cost 2,500 euros. That's all gone," says Pedro Altarrea. All that ended, and the Duruelo furniture industry was left with three or four carpentry workshops and a few professionals.

The raw materials also remained. The wood from some centuries-old pines of extraordinary quality remained. And that's very important.

“We didn't know anything about pine or wood in 2009, we had no family ties or experience,” says Pau Sarquella, the architect who invented the Barcelona blinds with his partner Diana Usón. “In 2009, we were in our fifth year and came across a competition open to students held by Barcelona City Council and the FAD Foundation. It was called Public Corners, and the goal was to find places in the city that were in a state of neglect and then propose a solution. We focused on Malnom and Picalquers, some narrow streets in the Raval, a dark and narrow area with poor connections to the rest of the neighborhood. We noticed that the residents were hanging laundry on their balconies because the apartments were small and there was no room inside, and that this gave an impression of disarray. When it rained, they did what they could. Some put plastic sheets over their clothes, and others opened the blinds over them .”

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 manufactured mainly in the furniture industry of Sax, Alicante (hence its name) and sold in hardware stores since the 1960s. The Alicante blind is a cheap and efficient product, easy to install but not very durable. It's a good invention that was just waiting for someone to give it a little twist and improve it.

That's what Usón and Sarquella did: they designed a blind that was like the Alicante blind without the defects of the one from Alicante. They slightly modified the shape of the slats so that water wouldn't seep in, thus effectively insulating the clotheslines on the balconies of the Raval district. They managed to make those same slats offer an intermediate position, half open, half closed, so that it functioned like a lattice and allowed air and light to pass through without losing privacy . They created a prototype in a carpentry shop in Banyoles and began to move it to larger workshops. No one felt capable of mass-producing Usón and Sarquella's invention at competitive costs until someone took them to Duruelo. The best pine on the market was supposed to come from that region. If anyone could understand what Barcelona architects needed, they had to be there.

The Altelarrea brothers were carpenters, sons of carpenters. They had inherited the trade of turner, the most sophisticated of those related to wood, and had bought a workshop to become self-employed, but they were in the survival economy that the entire construction sector in Spain had entered. "What convinced us about blinds? We had to move forward, to try something. In this region, there was a lot of complacency, and that's also why the industry collapsed," says Pedro Altelarrea in Duruelo. "Pau and Diana offered us to go into partnership with them and a company from Girona, Sumace, which finds customers and finishes the product for them. Since we saw that they were willing to take risks, there was an incentive, a reason to trust them. But we had to make a significant investment ."

In the family workshop, there are six machines that work on making sheets: the optimizer, the molding machine, two additional sawing machines, a nailer, and a hook-making machine. 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 quality , a German paint. We invented a color range to bring the blinds to the 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 in many social housing developments." Today, the Barcelona blinds online store sells per square meter for 79.86 euros. 50% more than what Alicante blinds cost.

"We presented the blind at [the home decor store] Vinçon in 2015, and they really liked it. Initially, they asked us to design it for private homes. The image started circulating, and we began to have sponsoring clients," Sarquella recalls. After the pandemic, the buzz became unstoppable. Orders poured in from the Netherlands, Portugal, France, Hong Kong, Canada, and Switzerland, the FAD awards arrived, and the carpentry firm Pedro and Rubén Altelarrea doubled its production year after year. "We're already at the limit of our capacity," says Pedro Altelarrea.

And what if an investment fund put two million into the carpentry business and allowed them to continue growing? " I'd be delighted to hear them, but I'm a little skeptical. We've been developing these machines year after year . The labor force doesn't exist. And we have another limit: raw materials."

Altelarrea takes the car and drives to the neighboring village of Vilviestre del Pinar, where his 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 free of knots. That's why it is 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 is enough, 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 privileged prices. " If there were a forest fire, we would be in a very bad way. But these forests are communally owned. Communal forests don't burn like private ones ," says the carpenter.

"Why do you think people buy this blind?" "Because it's very pretty, I wouldn't give it much thought," Altelarrea answers.