Our Marrakech Studio
An atelier in Marrakech. A storefront in Austin.
Apartment F is a woman-owned textile studio, and I run it from Marrakech, where I live full-time.
I find vintage rugs across Morocco — woven decades ago, in homes and villages all over the country, by families who've been passing weaving down for generations. I bring them home to our atelier, wash them, mend them, and give them the second life they deserve.
Alongside the rugs, our atelier designs and sews an original line of pillows — linen, cotton, and hand-loomed fabrics — sewn from scratch by the same team that mends the rugs.
How a rug comes home
Sourced. I spend a lot of my year on the road in Morocco — driving up into the High Atlas, the Middle Atlas, all the way down south — sitting in living rooms with the families who wove these pieces. Sometimes the rug we end up bringing home has been folded in a corner of someone's house for forty years. Sometimes it's been on the floor the whole time, walked on, loved already. Either way, every one of them carries the hand of the person who made it. That's the part you can't replicate, and it's the part I'm always looking for.
Washed. Every rug we bring home gets washed by hand in our atelier in Marrakech, and I'm usually on the roof with the team when a new piece comes in. It's slow, physical work — soap, water, brushes, sun, patience. We're protective about this part because a vintage rug really only gets one good wash to start its second life, and we'd rather take three days on it than rush. The wool relaxes. The colors come back. You can almost feel the rug exhale.
Mended. A rug that's lived one life comes with stories, and stories tend to leave marks — a hole here, a frayed edge there, fringe that's seen better days. We mend by hand. I sit at the frame for some of the work, the rest gets done by the women on our team who've been mending rugs longer than I've been collecting them. We refringe. We stabilize the corners and the binding. We don't try to make a rug look new, because new isn't the point — but we do want every piece to leave us strong enough to last another lifetime in someone else's home.
Sent home. When a rug is finally ready, it travels from Marrakech to our shop on East 11th in Austin. That's where you'll find it — hanging on our rug walls, waiting for someone. If you're nearby, please stop by and meet our team. Even if you don't take one home, the shop is the closest thing to standing in our atelier without the plane ticket.
When a rug can't be saved
Some rugs come to us a little too far gone to wear another life as a rug — too many holes, too much wear, the structure too tired to take another generation of feet. But the wool itself is still extraordinary, and so is the work that went into it.
Think about everything one of these pieces has held. Hand-spun in a village in the High Atlas. Dyed with what was growing nearby — pomegranate skins, henna, indigo, walnut. Woven on a loom set up in someone's living room, often by more than one woman, often over months. Then it sat under a family for a generation. Mint tea spilled on it. A baby learned to crawl on it. A grandmother folded it up every spring and laid it back down every fall. The hands that made it worked too hard, and the life it lived afterwards was too full, for any of it to end up in a bin.
So we save what we can. The strongest sections of those rugs — the parts with the most life still in them — get cut, sewn, and finished in our Marrakech atelier into the pillows and poufs we sell under our own label. Each one is one of a kind, because each one used to be part of one.
When you bring home one of our upcycled pillows, you're not bringing home a reproduction of anything. You're bringing home a piece of a rug that already had a whole life — kept alive, and given another.
We make every piece
We are makers. Every piece of the Apartment F line is designed by me and made by us — by hand, in Marrakech, with the team I've built and the partner studios I've worked with for years. I sew pillows alongside our team in the atelier. I'm in the wash room with the rugs we're repairing. I sit at the wheel when we're prototyping a new piece of pottery. The people I work with carry skills I'll never fully master — generations of weaving, throwing, hammering, glassblowing, mending — but every piece that ends up on East 11th has been made by us together. Not sourced. Not bought. Made.
Pottery. I design every piece in our pottery line — the sun plates, the kasbah candle holders — and I'm in the studio alongside our ceramicists when we're prototyping. They throw and glaze by hand, using techniques their workshops have been refining for generations. I sketch, we work it out together, they bring the kiln expertise I'll never have on my own.
Glassware. Our glassware is hand-blown in a small studio in Marrakech we've worked with for years. I'm there when we're designing new shapes and again when we test prototypes — but the bench is theirs, and what comes off it is something I couldn't make alone. No two pieces are ever quite identical. The bubbles, the slight tilts, the way the light catches the rim are exactly why we'll never switch to a factory.
Baskets. The baskets are designed alongside the women weavers I work with across the country — palm leaf and doum, woven by hand, often outdoors, often in groups of four or five. I sketch the silhouettes and travel out to see them woven. They bring a tradition I'm only learning. The result is something neither of us could make alone.
A note from Ashley
Apartment F started in 2015, in my apartment in Brooklyn — apartment F, hence the name. I had a few rugs I'd brought back from Morocco and a feeling that other people might love them the way I did. Eleven years later, I live in Marrakech full-time. The work that started in that apartment is now an atelier here, with a storefront waiting on East 11th in Austin.
The geography isn't really a brand decision — it's a life one. The closer I am to the work, the better the work gets. I know the families I source from. I know the people on our atelier team — they're not "partners" or "suppliers," they're the women and men I see every week and walk into the studio with every morning. I see every rug before it leaves us, and every pillow we sew on the way out the door.
Thank you for being here, and for caring about where things come from. None of this would mean much without you.
— Ashley
Visit us in Austin
Our shop on East 11th is the only place to see the full collection in person. It's also where we keep all the other things we love — apothecary, pantry, candles, small gifts — made by independent makers and artisans we've gotten to know along the way. They work the way we work: small studios, real hands, quiet attention to the thing in front of them. We carry their work because it belongs next to ours. If you're ever in Austin, please come by. Bring a friend, walk slowly, ask us anything.
1200 E. 11th St., Suite 104 · Austin, TX