Ábbatte: the textile craft that flourishes beside a 13th-century monastery in Segovia

Founding Ábbatte has been, for Elena Goded, a wager on material culture — a vindication of slowness, mastery, and permanence. The Segovian firm creates artisanal textiles from first-quality natural fibres, alpaca, merino wool, silk, linen, hemp, cashmere, woven on hand looms by skilled hands, one by one, with the conviction that well-made objects not only last, but transform, grow richer with time, and ultimately become part of our story. “We create artistic objects for daily life, objects that we love,” says Elena Goded.

The project has a double vocation. On one hand, to create lasting pieces that dignify the everyday: the table, the bed, the inhabited space, restoring to textile the symbolic and aesthetic place it once occupied in our culture. On the other, to foster knowledge through seminars, courses and encounters with the aim of revaluing textile craft.

The Segovian monastery

In the 13th century, the Cistercian Order raised the monastery of Santa María de la Sierra on the Segovian slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, in Collado Hermoso. Cistercian architecture answered to a severe rule: sobriety, proportion, rejection of the superfluous. Those same values, form arising from material, without ornament to betray it, are present today, eight centuries on, in every piece that leaves the Ábbatte workshop.

The small community that inhabited the monastery came to host kings in the 14th century. Then came the decline, the gradual abandonment, the 19th-century ecclesiastical confiscations that turned the building into a farm. The stones began to fall. In 2005, Elena Goded and her husband acquired the ruins. “I did not seek out the monastery, it was the monastery that found me,” she recounts, “and we made a commitment to give it the greatest possible care.”

What followed was a work of consolidation as artisanal in spirit as the work now carried out within its walls: a local stonemason went fixing stone by stone the structure, securing the perimeter with a metal tie, while lichens, stone degraded by water and vegetation growing between the joints were continuously cleared away. The ruin stabilised without being falsified. Its condition as a fragment, as arrested time, was respected. In dialogue with the monastery, new working spaces were built: volumes of local timber and golden granite that frame it without usurping the character of the place.

Today the monastery of Santa María de la Sierra forms part of Ábbatte’s DNA: a building that encapsulates, with the eloquence of what has survived, the essential values of the firm: mastery, rootedness in the land, permanence. The monastery, ever present, reminds those who work beside its arches of the continuity of human endeavour.

The workshop beside the monastery

The Ábbatte workshop occupies one of the new pavilions built alongside the monastery. It is a luminous, ordered space, where hand looms stand in line like instruments of a craft that admits no shortcuts. The warp, that array of parallel, taut threads that forms the foundation of the weave, is prepared with patience before the weft can begin its interlacing. Once a piece is finished, it is hand-finished with needle and thread, then washed so that the taut fibres relax and the textile reaches its definitive hand.

The weavers who bring these pieces to life are professionals from Segovia, led by Elena Goded Rambaud, founder of the firm, and Camila Lanzas, its creative director, art historian and designer. The team is formed by Cristina Escribano, María del Carmen Gimeno, Carmen Palermo, Marta Rueda, and Ana María Martín Gil, who was part of the team at the San Pablo workshops of the renowned Gerda Kramer, and later trained the new Ábbatte team in its early days.

Beside the weaving workshop, in one of the timber cabins on the estate, the dyeing of yarns takes place. It is here that the work takes on something close to the alchemical. The pigments, sourced exclusively from plants or insects, are applied through a rigorous process comprising three stages: scouring, to cleanse the fibre of impurities; mordanting, to fix the colour; and the dye bath, at controlled temperature. The result is colours not found in any conventional catalogue. Intense yet elusive, always in harmony with one another because they all proceed from the same source: nature. They are, in Goded’s words, colours for visual pleasure.

The dye garden: a recovered heritage

Where Cistercian monks once cultivated their kitchen garden, Ábbatte has created something extraordinary: an ethnobotanical garden of dye plants that is one of the most complete in Europe. Seventy distinct species, dyer’s broom, indigo, tansy, bearberry, sumac, madder, and many others, grow in geometric terraces overlooking the sierra, sheltered by the monastery walls as if in an organic continuation of the same monastic vocation.

Each plant has had to prove that it can survive the Segovian climate and that it contains, in some part of itself, root, leaf, flower, bark, pigments suited to dyeing. Diego de Allas, responsible for the garden and the overall maintenance of the estate, is the guardian of this green heritage.
Madder deserves special mention. Its root produces an intense terracotta red that Mediterranean civilisations —Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome— and northern cultures used for millennia. Castile was for centuries one of Europe’s principal suppliers of quality madder. A knowledge that was lost, and that Ábbatte, quietly, is working to recover.

The garden, however, does not aim to produce the dyes used in the workshop, for that, many hectares would be needed for each pigment. Its mission is more subtle and ambitious: to make known this specific use of plants, as ancient as civilisation and as forgotten as so many essential things. To transmit value, to make visible what time has rendered invisible.

The Ábbatte collection

The Ábbatte collection embraces the domestic space in its entirety: blankets, quilts and bed runners; cushions; rugs; tablecloths and napkins; curtains, sheers and Japanese roller blinds; upholstered headboards; and wearable pieces, shawls, ponchos, scarves, that carry the same philosophy to the body as to the home. The underlying aim in all of them is always the same: materiality must not be concealed, it must be revealed.

The textiles are woven in classic structures —plain weave, herringbone, houndstooth— in widths of up to 3.10 metres. For larger-scale projects, Ábbatte assembles several lengths according to its own criteria: the joins are integrated into the design, sometimes as almost imperceptible seams in the same tone as the textile, at other times as contrasts that underscore the composition and lend it character. A gesture of constructive honesty not alien to the tradition of the finest crafts.

The colour palette, built entirely from natural dyes and executed to order, produces those indefinable tones that resist being precisely named yet are recognised at once as belonging to nature: earths, ochres, blues that lean towards green, pinks that recall damp clay. Colours that age well, that change with the light, that keep you company.

Textile as interior architecture

Cada vez más estudios de arquitectura e interiorismo encuentran en An increasing number of architecture and interior design studios find in Ábbatte a partner with whom to build the sensorial atmosphere of their projects. The firm works both on comprehensive textile commissions for a home or space and on individual pieces that complete or elevate already-defined interiors.

The Ábbatte portfolio includes projects in Menorca, Asturias, Santander, Madrid, Alicante and Toledo, and collaborations with studios as prestigious as Pierre Yovanovitch and Marta de la Rica, among others. Alpaca blankets over chaise longues, Castilian wool rugs in rooms with timber ceilings, cushion sets for stone porches, linen-merino tablecloths on walnut tables. In each case, the piece becomes part of the memory of the space.

For design professionals, Ábbatte also offers advisory meetings, in person or online, to explore in detail the processes, available materials and commissioning possibilities. The workshop is open to developing ideas for new uses of textile: fabric screens to divide spaces, special upholsteries, wall coverings. The only condition is that the material be noble and the process honest.

In a sector where the ephemeral has become the norm, Ábbatte proposes an alternative that is profoundly contemporary: the conviction that well-made objects transform the people who inhabit them. That living with artisanal textiles transmits calm and restores the capacity to perceive the value of what endures.

Elena Goded Rambaud

Elena Goded is a biologist by training, a doctor in Philosophy and Educational Sciences, a university professor for decades, and now, perhaps as the natural consequence of all that came before, the founder of one of the most singular and acclaimed textile craft projects in Spain.

She graduated in Biological Sciences at a time when the scientific gaze and the artistic gaze were still considered separate territories. Her career brought them closer together. Over more than twenty years she was a tenured professor at UNED, where she directed the Textile Crafts course from 1990 to 2010, training generations of teachers in the knowledge of fabrics, dyes and the crafts of fibre. In parallel, she taught courses at various universities on natural dyes, applied botany and the history of dress: a territory of intersection between science, history and material culture that few had explored with such rigour.

This teaching work led her to publish reference works for the study of textile craft, among them the volumes El taller textil en el aula: Tintes naturales and El taller textil en el aula: La tejeduría, published by UNED, which remain foundational texts in their field. Her rigour as a researcher and her ability to convey the value of the crafts made her an authority in the Spanish landscape of artisanal culture.

That body of knowledge, accumulated over decades, found an unexpected stage from 2005 onwards. That year, Elena and her husband acquired the ruins of the Cistercian monastery of Santa María de la Sierra, in Collado Hermoso, Segovia. It was not a premeditated decision: it was, as she herself recounts, an encounter. “I did not seek out the monastery, it was the monastery that found me.” What followed was a long, demanding commitment to the restoration and consolidation of the remains of the abbey, which were in a state of advanced abandonment.

In that same territory, in 2013, Ábbatte was born —its name derived from the Latin term for abbey— co-founded with her daughter Camila Lanzas, art historian and designer. The firm represented the confluence of everything Elena Goded had cultivated throughout her career: scientific knowledge of fibres and pigments, a historical understanding of textile as cultural object, a pedagogical vocation, and a deep rootedness in a place and a territory. Ábbatte is a synthesis of the road travelled.

Recognition came quickly. In 2015, Ábbatte received the National Crafts Award in the Entrepreneurship category, granted by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. In 2017, the project was distinguished with the Hispania Nostra Award for Good Practices in the conservation of cultural and natural heritage, a prize that explicitly recognised the work of recovering the monastery and transforming it into a living productive space.

Elena Goded’s standing in the field of contemporary craft extends well beyond her own enterprise. In 2018 she was one of the founders and president of SACo, the Society of Contemporary Craftspeople, an association that brings together Spanish designers and craft firms under criteria of excellence and contemporaneity, with the aim of establishing quality craftsmanship as a cultural and economic reference of the first order. SACo has since developed projects of national and international visibility, including collaborations with Mazda at the Madrid Design Festival. The Juan March Foundation, at its Palma headquarters, has also hosted lectures by Elena Goded on artisanal textiles and their philosophy, integrating her work into the circuit of contemporary Spanish culture.

Today Elena Goded leads Ábbatte from the Segovian monastery, alongside Camila Lanzas and a team of local weavers and craftspeople. Her figure embodies something that has become rare: coherence between thought and practice, research and object, tradition and contemporary proposal. At a moment when craft is once again being reclaimed as a cultural and environmental response to the excesses of industrial production, Elena Goded has spent decades building, with patience and rigour, precisely that.

Project by Elena Goded Rambaud