Dream Weaver

On France’s Mediterranean coast, a savant of stripes has resurrected a regional fabric renowned for its colorful, beachy style, and created a new life for a tiny town.

- Meg Lukens Noonan

Henri Quinta sees stripes everywhere: colored pencils in a case, books on a shelf, flowers in a cultivated field. He sees them in striated sunset skies and wave-creased seas. Sometimes he sees stripes when he closes his eyes at night—especially, he says with a laugh, if he’s had a little too much wine.

The trim, youthful 66-year-old’s eye for stripes has served him well as the owner and artistic director of Les Toiles du Soleil (which means “the cloth of the sun”), a small manufacturer of robust, exuberantly striped cotton fabric used in deck chairs, table linens, upholstery, espadrilles, and more. The goods are produced in Saint Laurent de Cerdans, a French Catalan village that until the 1960s had thrived as a manufacturing center of espadrilles and the striped fabric used to make the ropesoled shoes. Globalization took its toll on the century-old mills, however, and by 1993 only one remained. When Henri and his wife, Françoise (both interior designers from the nearby city of Perpignan), heard that the last mill was on the verge of shutting down, they went to see it.

“It was in very bad condition,” Henri says as he drives the narrow, forested road that winds through the Pyrenees foothills to the factory. “And we knew nothing about fabric or weaving.”

But something about the old-world machines and the rich heritage of the village called out to them. After months of deliberation, they took the leap and bought the mill.