Langhorne Carpet Company Exterior Sign Makeover!

If you’ve passed by Langhorne Carpets on Route 1 (West Lincoln Highway) in Penndel lately, you might have noticed some extra activity. Scaffolding has gone up, down, and up again along the red brick wall that faces the busy Bucks County thoroughfare.

The brick exterior of our Wilton Jacquard mill has seen more than a century of changes. When it was built in 1907, the structure was an  architectural pioneer because of its free-standing roof—no supporting beams. For generations, our mill has withstood time’s tests. Alas, over the decades, the hand-painted mural outside hasn’t had such luck. Through the years, environmental and man-made conditions have taken their toll. Every few decades, we’ve had to repaint it.

This time, we’ve gone a step further. We joined up with Vital Signs, a project founded in 2013 by our friends at Temple Contemporary (part of the University’s Tyler School of Art) and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Vital Signs pairs active, multi-generation Philadelphia-area businesses with local artists to restore hand-painted exterior signs to their original glory.

For the past few months, we’ve worked with artists and re-pointers to get our wall back into shape. We’re excited to invite the public to an official reveal of the restored sign at 1 p.m. on Thursday, December 1, 2016!

Sculptor Finds Creative Use for Langhorne Carpets Jacquards!

Activity at our mill seems to increase in autumn. This season is no exception: Langhorne Carpets family has been busy making our new Pixels, awaiting the installation of a new historic reproduction in a grand government building, and ramping up our collaborations with cutting-edge designers.

Still, we wanted to stop to recognize the creativity of longtime Morrow family friend Edward Murphy, a Buckingham, Pennsylvania-based artist who re-purposed a box of our hand-punched cardboard Jacquards in his studio.

Murphy is a sculptor known for his exploration and manipulation of geometric shapes, and his use of found natural objects such as bark and old wood. He shares studio space with his wife, a painter. The couple works side by side in a late-19th century blacksmith’s barn on their countryside property. Years ago, Ed brought home a box of unused Jacquards—the traditional, rectangular hole-perforated cards that run through our looms, dictating the pattern of each of our carpets—from the mill, envisioning using them for a future project. For eight years, those Jacquards sat idle. Then he decided to renovate the barn, turn the second floor into an office, and use the cards as a window treatment.

A large window looks southwesterly onto the artists’ property, offering a stunning view of nearby farms. But this summer was a hot one. The Murphys needed relief from the sun streaming into their office. That’s when Ed remembered his already-strung cards. “I just flashed on it. The cards were exactly the right size,” he recalled. He screwed them in place, and, behold: “A beautiful pattern of dots that are just random enough let in just enough light, and disperses the pattern into the room.”

Langhorne Carpets applauds our friend Ed Murphy’s creative reuse—and always welcomes creative thinkers and makers to our Penndel, Bucks County mill for tours and inspiration.