Wood is our element. It is warm and alive; it is soft and robust at the same time. Its irregular shapes and incomplete patterns make it unique and truly beautiful to our eyes. Its texture holds a wealth of information and hidden stories waiting to be discovered by the senses of every child. Over time, the wood will acquire subtle dents and scars, and this means that it has accomplished its very aim, providing children with hours and hours of free and open-ended play, and we deeply cherish that.

Colour has the power to connect with our mood and everything else happening inside of us. This is why our dyes come directly from nature, and reconnect us to her in return. Each piece is stained by hand; working with dyes instead of acrylic paint allows us to keep in contact with the wood and its veins in a kind and noble way. The dye sinks deep into the surface of the wood without covering its beauty and giving an everlasting effect.

we want to make sure that every child has a free and respectful upbringing, filled with playtimes that are open-ended and free from expectations or judgement. The pieces should invite and incite their own genuine flair for creation. For this, we offer play material without instructions nor limits. Our duty as parents is to protect this sacred moment, without interfering, just observing and being present. Our motto is “be free, play open!”

Nature is both our clock and our muse. Our creations are an offering to her, not an attempt to modify her laws. Our goal is simplicity itself – when working on a product, we draw inspiration from its true natural form and then try to reduce it to the essential, detaching from the unnecessary and the superfluous, in order to offer material that is truly open, ready to transform into whatever the child needs in every playtime.

Grapat started to form as an idea after the birth of our first child, Lola. We realised how she didn’t really need any off-the-shelf toys in order to play and would use her ingeniousness to turn everyday objects into whatever she desired. Looking at how happy she was, we realised that being present, observing her needs and offering daily objects to fulfil them, was all that really mattered. After the birth of our second child Tomàs, we moved from the big city to the countryside. In the former home of Jordi’s family, we could integrate the slower way of life we had been longing for. We started to create and play with wood, and slowly but surely, the family home turned into a fully operational workshop. We would create the pieces with machinery installed in the barn where a donkey used to live years before and would stain them by hand with old sheets in kitchen where Jordi’s grandmother used to cook up delicious meals. This is when our dream, our own company, finally materialised. Grapat means “a handful” in Catalan, the native language of our land, and this is exactly where the simple idea behind this humble project came from: to carry a handful of loose pieces with the utmost care in our hands, and offer them with the same love to the hands of children.

Grapat has grown a lot since its birth in 2015, spreading globally over 62 countries and needing more and more production space every year, but it is still – and always will be – a family project. It is the manifestation of our way of life and the vision for the future we believe in, so we care for it as if it were another child in the family. We still create new pieces and prototypes out of clay or beeswax, we still communicate with the world using our own authentic voice and we keep staining our pieces by hand in-house. We ARE Grapat, and things just couldn’t be any different.

The British publication Junior Magazine celebrates every year the Junior Design Awards, where they acknowledge innovative and creative product designs in different categories.

#CELEBRATE LIFE

Dear Grapat family,

The last few days have been a challenge for Grapat, our beloved company, as well as for us personally. None of us have ever experienced anything like this before, but we have done our best to remain hopeful despite feelings of fear, confusion, and isolation.

In the spirit of protecting the nature around us, last Saturday, 3rd of July we were cleaning the beach in Sant Pere Pescador, removing plastics and litter in general that was taking over the beautiful landscape. We would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts all the Warriors who came to fight alongisde us against the rubbish and we hope to see them again at the next event. Together we’ll make it!