Sabine Marcelis’ Roll x cc-tapis goes beyond two-dimensional rugs

Roll by Sabine Marcelis x cc-tapis - Photo by Alejandro Ramirez Orozco.

Roll by Sabine Marcelis x cc-tapis – All photos are by Alejandro Ramirez Orozco.

Design. Italian high-end rug company cc-tapis has returned to Mexico Art Week 2026 with something rather special: Roll, a captivating wool-and-resin carpet by Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis that cleverly plays with our expectations of what a rug can be.

RELATED STORIES: Find out more about Mexico Art Week on Archipanic.

This three-piece limited edition captures a rug mid-roll — quite literally freezing an everyday action into a functional sculpture that serves as both floor covering and seating. It’s Design with a wink: the flat surface becomes your seat, whilst the rolled portion transforms into a comfortable backrest. A quiet shift in perspective that sits somewhere between furniture and textile.

The beauty lies in how Roll takes something we all know — sitting on a rug and leaning back against something for support — and turns that casual moment into a deliberately crafted piece. It’s familiar yet fresh, everyday yet sculptural.

“Material contrast plays a central role in the project,” adds Sabine Marcelis. “The softness of wool meets the hardness and translucency of resin, creating a dialogue between opposing sensibilities.” Here, Marcelis brings together her signature resin work with premium wool, creating a tactile conversation between contrasting materials that somehow feel perfectly balanced.

Despite their different characters, both materials share a unified monochromatic palette, lending the piece a cohesive, sophisticated aesthetic that’s entirely approachable.

Crafted at Made in Milan — cc-tapis’s in-house prototyping studio — Roll showcases the possibilities of robotufting, a technique offering the precision and creative freedom to achieve complex forms and directional tufting that traditional methods simply can’t match.

The series made its debut in a site-specific installation at Mexico City’s Valner Residence, a striking early-1970s home by architect Agustín Hernández. With Roll, cc-tapis continues pushing boundaries in contemporary rug design, exploring new materials and playfully rethinking what these objects can do.