The Measure of a Hand. MACHEIA
In the wetlands around Santarém, bulrush is cut once a year, gathered by hand and left to dry in the summer sun. Months later, in a studio on the edge of Lisbon, it becomes something else entirely: a spiral rising from a steel arc, a woven mural, a lamp that seems to hold light the way memory holds a moment. This is the work of MACHEIA, and it begins where most design ends, with the material itself.
MACHEIA was founded in 2020 by Lucrezia Papillo, an Italian-German product designer trained at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, and Iany Gayo, a Mozambican-Portuguese architect who studied at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico. Two women, two disciplines, one practice built on the conviction that the oldest techniques still have the most to say.
The name carries the whole philosophy. A macheia is a handful, the amount a single hand can hold. It is a measure of quantity and a measure of intent at once. Everything here passes through human hands, slowly and deliberately, with the maker’s touch left visible in the finished form.
Much of their work revives Bunho, an endangered Portuguese weaving technique now practised by only two artisans left in Europe. One of them, master weaver Manuel Ferreira, works closely with the studio. Together they take the spiral motifs of traditional basketry and set them against galvanised iron and steel, so that a craft once destined for the archive becomes sculptural, contemporary, and alive. The Bulrush Collection is the clearest expression of this: fibre and metal in conversation, the handmade and the engineered holding each other up. Assento, a piece that hovers between stool and side table, grows a spiral of bulrush straight from a minimalist steel arc.
There is an ethic beneath the beauty. The materials are local, drawn from Portugal’s wetlands with almost no footprint. The knowledge is ancestral, kept alive by paying artisans to keep practising. Each object extends the life of a technique that would otherwise vanish, a quiet form of preservation dressed as furniture.
This is why MACHEIA belongs to the story SWS wants to tell. At Lisbon by Design, we supported the studio’s participation, including a large mural that reimagined traditional straw techniques. Backing two women who are reviving a fading craft, on their own terms, is precisely the cultural work our community exists to make possible. When we speak of the women shaping Lisbon, we mean this: hands in the fibre, eyes on what might otherwise be lost.
Supported by Sassy Women Society at Lisbon by Design 2026.