“If someone had told me this story 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it”

My grandfather started the Huguet factory in Campos with a partner, in 1933. The world of hydraulic tiles was very typical back then, there were more than a hundred factories like ours all over Mallorca. They made their pieces in every village, it was very commonplace. Until the 1960s, when they started to close one after the other with the tourist boom. My father was in charge of the company during those difficult years. He decided to put the tile business to one side and focussed on cement, beams and breeze bocks, which was what really sold at that time. I was a boy and I still remember the smell of the cement and my father, very stern, working there. It was he who passed on to me the rigour we continue to do things with today.

In the ‘90s, I was studying to be an architectural technician in Barcelona, and I experienced all the movement that was calling for the restoration of modernism, all the Gaudí things and other buildings in the city. And that was when I spoke to my father and said, “we have to recover the hydraulic tiles’. He heard me and started doing test runs whilst I was finishing my degree. But then my father passed away.

The truth is that I had no intention of coming back, I liked the life I had in Barcelona and subsequently in London. But inside me, I was still drawn to the hydraulic tiles, I was keen to recover this traditional product which had so much personality. And that was how I become a tile manufacturer. That initial idea of recovering the traditional architecture has gradually evolved, and nowadays we create contemporary tiles that go all over the world.

The most attractive features of hydraulic tiles are mainly their texture, their history, the manual technique, as well as the fact that they are made of a sustainable material that ages very well. One day the fashion designer Sybilla contacted us and proposed making a collection. Shortly afterwards, the prestigious Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were constructing the Forum building in Barcelona (2004) and they asked us to do something special in hydraulic for their project. And the architect Alberto Lievore, winner of the National Architecture Prize, built a house in Mallorca and used us. So that was how we grew. If someone had told me this story twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.

There have been other key projects that have had big repercussions for us, like the restaurant Jaleo of chef José Andrés, in Washington, an establishment where the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, ate from time to time. We also collaborated on the construction of the Szczecin philharmonic hall, in Poland, which won the Mies Van der Rohe prize for best building in 2015. 

The key was all of the knowledge we have accumulated at the same time as we recovered techniques from a century ago, and also our [...]

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