Marta de la Rica opens The Lab, a design studio turned experimental playground

In Madrid, Marta de la Rica has turned her design studio inward, creating The Lab as a place to test how ideas take physical form and how matter, once engaged, begins to think for itself.

'What felt unresolved had more to do with form than substance,' she reflects. 'The tension between structure and play, colour and restraint remains, but now it’s applied at a smaller, more intimate scale.' The project extends that exploration into a site of experiment and transformation, where intuition meets technique and materials find their voice

The Lab, by Marta de la Rica

The Lab exists within her studio, moving to its own tempo and allowing ideas to evolve through collaboration and material study. 'Each collection becomes an in-depth exchange with an artisan or artist,' she notes. 'It lets us create pieces that can belong to our interiors while standing alone as singular works.'

Within The Lab, making serves as a method of research, an open system where gesture tests what drawing can only suggest. Dialogue with material and craftsman reshapes each idea in real time. 'Rigour and risk are perfect words for it,' de la Rica affirms. 'The balance lies in staying open to change while keeping a sense of direction. You have to allow evolution without losing focus.'

For de la Rica, material is more than medium; it becomes participant. 'The material speaks,' she adds. 'Its texture, weight or resistance can suggest a gesture we hadn’t imagined. You have to listen; that dialogue often leads to unexpected results.'

Dubbed Of Marble & Metal, the Lab's inaugural collection features a temperamental materiality: marble patient and composed, metal restless and quick to react. Their interaction becomes a kind of alchemy, a negotiation between calm and impulse.

Feeling, too, is treated as something tangible. De la Rica considers emotion capable of form, able to inhabit a polished surface or the glow of reflected light. 'Emotion can live within an object,' she observes. 'In a texture that invites touch or a form that quietly makes you smile.'

Elsewhere, playfulness offsets precision. A lamp shaped as a hand holding a torch, a table poised on bronze paws – gestures that temper discipline with wit. 'I’m quite organised, sometimes even controlling,' she admits, 'but The Lab is where I let go. It’s where I can play, and enjoy it.'

The Lazy Susan Dining Table, inspired by family meals, lets sharing take shape through motion, as objects pass and return with convivial rhythm. As its marble top revolves, plates and bottles slide between hands, extending conversation through touch and timing. Around that motion, The Lab’s ethos stays in flux, responsive to change and sustained by collaboration.

Of Marble and Metal collection is available from martadelarica.es from 1 November 2025