Prato, Italy
The House of Lyria
Based in the Tuscan city of Prato, the heart of Italy’s textile industry, The House of Lyria produces original, timeless fabrics unlike any in the region.
Founder Riccardo Bruni, the creative force behind The House of Lyria, is an auteur of textiles who merges tradition, experimentation, and emotion to create materials with a wholly unique character. The company is named after a rare, elegantly spiraling conch shell. It symbolizes the freedom of the ocean, a wide-open realm in which to dream and explore.
Created using organic materials—coffee, tea, ash—instead of chemical dyes, House of Lyria’s colors are often natural and muted, recalling ancient times. Riccardo prizes natural fibers such as wool, linen and cotton, implementing unconventional looming techniques to create novel textures and give fabrics a longer life.
For nearly two decades, The House of Lyria has created textiles for the world’s leading fashion designers and houses including Comme des Garçons, Uma Wang, Jil Sander and Yohji Yamamoto. Each season, they aim to create materials that have never before existed. Their headquarters in Prato, serves not only as a textile laboratory but also a hub of inspiration, housing an archive of 30,000 textiles and another 10,000 prototypes. “I want to give the impression that the fabric has lived,” says Bruni.
