Placemat pure linen starched

Nowadays, placemats are mostly made of plastic - due to the common belief that this material alone fulfills its purpose in the (stain) crisis area of table culture. Such opinions may be widespread, but they are not indisputable. And so we found what we were looking for when it came to placemats - at Charvet. The traditional French weaving mill uses an amazingly simple and effective technique that is not without finesse: it treats the surface of the already hard-wearing linen fabric with potato starch, giving it a very high level of strength - in an ecologically clean way. Now, even if people have a perfect command of etiquette in theory, they tend to be a little careless in practice - any resulting stains can be wiped off the starched pure linen placemat with a damp sponge.

For more than 100 years, the Charvet weaving mill has been based in the French town of Armentières, near the border with Flanders. The Nord-Pas-de-Calais region lies at the heart of one of Europe's traditional flax-growing areas. Charvet specialized in the production of linen and cotton fabrics; the product range included robust linen fabrics, which were used to make textiles for bakeries (toiles de boulangerie) and French workwear (e.g. "vareuses" for fishermen), as well as sailcloth fabrics.