This is why we only want to sleep under Gastaldi bed linen
Who doesn’t want to wake up under soft bed linen? When searching for the finest bed linen of luxury hotel quality, one will only be satisfied by the high-skilled workmanship of the Italian Gastaldi company. Here, linens are manufactured with great care to the finest detail. ‘No error will escape my gaze.’
You will find the soft linen of Gastaldi in every Pillows Hotels
A true family business
‘Linen is in our DNA’, says Marco Gasltadi, proud director and the fourth generation of the Gastaldi family run business. Marco’s great-grandfather and his brother founded the company in 1892, starting in a small warehouse and a handful of weavers. Nowadays, the site became almost twenty times larger and it employs around 300 people. Whereas many Italian companies moved their production process to other low-wage countries, Gastaldi still remains on the same spot in the north of Milan. ‘We believe that our quality can only be maintained if we have the production in our own hands.’
Weave by weave
The production of the Gastaldi linen is done with the utmost precision, where the big weaving machines in the factory hall are driven by huge bobbins. Like a puppeteer, they weave the linen and cotton from Egypt. The loose threads interweave and slowly transform into a sheet that grows millimetre by millimetre. The thousands of needles go up and down, hypnotically and continuously, at the same rhythm and at high speed. When you touch the newly woven fabric, you cannot imagine that it was loose yarn a few minutes ago. It’s soft, but also firm, and the fine weaves are only seen when you take a close-up look.
Clean, cleaner, cleanest
‘Watch out!’ the assistant of Marco says. It is necessary to keep your head up in the factory hall, or chance is that you will be attacked by a vacuum cleaner coming from the sky. They sweep back and forth, keeping the room as clean as possible from al the dust that has been created from the fabric.
Besides a clean factory hall, the Gastaldi linen itself is a very hygienic product as well. Gastaldi developed BACTIRIA, a revolutionary antibacterial fibre. Laboratory tests have shown that the number of microorganisms in fabrics from this fibre is reduced by 90 per cent within 24 hours. This makes the Gastaldi linen visibly and invisibly cleaner than standard linen.
100 shades of white
Most hotels, like Pillows Hotels, want their linen in the color white. Isn’t that a bit boring for Gastaldi? ‘No, certainly not.’ Marco replies laughing. ‘There are so many variations. Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. That’s what we have for the color white as well.’
The sharpest eye of Italy
Not a single linen leaves the factory until every inch of woven fabric has been checked by the naked eye. A pulled thread, a color difference or other unevenness: nothing escapes their gaze. When approved, the linen gets washed, pressed and dried, and is being folded in outright stacks. Even after packing and before transportation, everything is subjected to a final check. ‘I am 100 per cent sure that nothing less than the absolute quality leaves our warehouse, and therefore I can sleep peacefully at night. On our own bedding, of course!’.
Enjoy the hypoallergenic duck-down duvets of Pillows Hotels, housed in its own Gastaldi Egyptian cotton bed linen. Finding it hard to pull yourself out of your hotel bed? Fear not, as the bed linen can be ordered via the Pillows Shop.
