At the age of 11, Santiago left school and began to work as an apprentice in one of the few upholstery workshops that existed in Yecla. It was the year 1963, a time that coincided with the birth of the Furniture Fair (which became the first fair in the sector to be held in Spain) and the opening of new factories and workshops by workers who, on many occasions, had been trained in COMED, the Furniture Workers’ Cooperative promoted in 1949 by the parish priest of Yecla. José Esteban Díaz, true germ of the industrial potential of Yecla furniture.

Tired of being exploited, after two years of apprenticeship, Santiago decided to go to work in the fields with his father. It seems difficult that someone so young could even assume the idea of being exploited for work, but that boy with the body of a man was already a proud guy, with firm convictions.

The countryside was only a temporary refuge in which to appease his revolutionary character and very soon the possibility arose of returning to work in another upholstery company in which one of the delivery men offered him to set up a furniture company: “I sell them and distribute them and you manufacture them”, he proposed. But the adventure was short-lived and when Santiago managed to get rid of that partner in whom he did not quite trust, and recover the money he had invested, he went to work as a manager in another upholstery company.

True to his enterprising character and not a fan of taking orders, at the age of 15 he decided to set up, together with two colleagues, his first company, a workshop in which they fixed furniture and manufactured a model of “Marie Antoinette” style armchair that they tried to sell by traveling by van through towns throughout Spain.

On one of those trips, near La Coruña, they met the one who would be their first big client, who assured them of orders that provided a stability that many dreamed of. But Santiago never dreamed of stability and knew that he did not want to spend the rest of his life making “Marie Antoinettes”, so, given the lack of ambition of his partners, he decided to leave and set up a new company. One that was, at last, a reflection of his personality, to such an extent that he used the acronym of his name and surnames to create it: SANCAL.

The original headquarters of SANCAL occupied an old pigsty of 70 square meters that Santiago cleaned up and whitewashed with the help of his brother Pepe and Concha López (who would become his wife and companion in battle). It is difficult to imagine that primitive space, from the reality that today occupies a corporate headquarters that impresses, a reflection of a brand that has become a symbol of avant-garde and design.

The first thing Santiago started manufacturing were modular sofas. His training as an upholsterer and the desire to innovate and evolve the classic sofa manufactured by all the companies in Yecla at that time, led him to try to satisfy the tastes of a society that evolved and concentrated in cities where homes were increasingly smaller, demanding more versatile and functional furniture.

The magazines that fell into his hands, but, above all, the commercial trips to cities such as Barcelona, —where the culture of design was in full swing—, were an incentive and new horizons for Santiago, new ways of conceiving a design that he decided to exercise in a self-taught way. But Santiago’s real obsession, who was never tempted to sign his creations with his own name and did so under a pseudonym, was to create a brand, something that says a lot about his intelligence, his long-term vision and his entrepreneurial ambition, making him a precursor, an avant-garde within an industry that is almost always short-term and dominated. many times, because of the ego.

At the end of the 70s, Santiago began to travel to the Milan Fair with his brother-in-law José Antonio Saura (who at that time worked in an architecture studio), discovering there the great firms that dominated the international sector: B&B, Cattelan, Zanotta… Those first trips to the world capital of design and the meeting with the giants of the sector, allowed Santiago to broaden his horizons, feed his ambition and corroborate that his strategy was correct.

These trips with his brother-in-law also helped to lay the foundations of what years later, in the 80s, would be QUARTA, the contemporary furniture, design and interior design store, which José Antonio and Santiago founded in Murcia together with Elena and Concha, (their wives), and which ended up becoming another great exponent of design in our region.

After the death of Jose Antonio, it was Elena Castaño Carpena who took the reins of QUARTA, which continues to be a unique place for design lovers. A well-kept and unique space, which not only sells furniture from the main brands, but also exhibits them, in a strategy closer to the museographic than to the commercial, allowing Murcian society to discover and know, throughout these almost forty years, the great icons of design: Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe, Eames, Saarinen, Aalto, Castiglioni, Starck, Poulsen, Panton, Jacobsen… And the Spaniards Marquina, Ricard, Tusquets, Coderch and Milá. And, of course, SANCAL.

QUARTA and SANCAL are two totally independent projects, although, in some way, they fed off each other in their beginnings. Not only from a commercial and family point of view (Santiago was a partner in QUARTA and his sister Elena has shares in SANCAL), but also from the learning itself. “For us, as manufacturers, it was very important to know and understand first-hand what a customer wants when they are going to buy a piece of furniture, but also to be able to know, from the inside, the manufacturing and marketing processes of the large furniture brands that are sold in the store.”

Santiago’s international vision (which has taken the world by storm) contrasts with values that are very close to its roots and its place of origin. “Many companies have gone to work in China to lower production costs, but I have always refused. My people are my people. If we go abroad to have the furniture made, we would lose total control of the process and also that natural link with the place where we were born and with our people. You can be a global brand and, at the same time, be from here.”

That link with people is more than evident in Sancal, a family business wherever you look at it. Not only when Santiago incorporated his three siblings (Pepe, Elena and Toni) into the company and because some nephews and other relatives later joined; but because among the staff itself there are so many family “clans”.

On the other hand, “being from the village adds a priori a difficulty due to the distance, physical and mental, of the creation centers, but well managed, the periphery can be an advantage because it forces you to always be more attentive to everything.”

I ask him about a milestone, a moment that has meant a before and after, and he tells me about the collaboration with the Japanese Toyo Ito, considered one of the most innovative and influential architects on the international scene, awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2013 and author of such iconic and renowned works as the Serpentine Gallery in London. the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House (Taiwan) or the Sendai Media Library. “This collaboration was an endorsement of what has always been our philosophy: the commitment to design and the construction of an international brand”.

In addition to Toyo Ito, SANCAL has collaborated with other great design references, such as Karim Rashid, Luca Nichetto, Sebastian Herkner, Raw Color or Studiopepe. And the great success of these collaborations has been that these names have never been above the brand, contributing to give it value, make it more notorious and project it internationally. .

When talking about the IKEA phenomenon, Santiago understands that the Swedish giant, far from being a competitor, has become an ally capable of promoting a mass culture of design that did not exist before. “At first, our designs were more functional and sought to please a mass audience, but today the brand can afford a higher level of risk to differentiate itself and strengthen its own personality. SANCAL’s goal is not to please everyone, it is to create trends, inspire and open new paths”.

Today, the search for these new paths and the future of SANCAL, falls to their daughters, Elena and Esther, who in 2007 began to take the reins of a business in which they never thought they would succeed their parents (Esther has a degree in Political Science and Sociology and Elena has a degree in Fine Arts). “I was here until I was 70 years old, but I understood that it was more of a nuisance than a help. Now I come just to check the mail and have a coffee. They are doing very well, I am very proud of them. If it had not been like that or they had not decided to take on this challenge, I would have sold the company.”

To finish, I ask him if he would not have liked to teach, teach others and that his experience could be useful to train future entrepreneurs, designers or professionals in the sector. “I don’t think he would have been a good teacher. To be a good teacher you have to know how to teach and I have always preferred to do things on my own, without knowing how to delegate. I am, perhaps, too demanding with myself and I imagine that, inevitably, I will also end up being demanding with others. That’s why, now, the only thing I want is to get bored and enjoy not thinking about anything, not to demand myself every day, which is a new feeling for me. With the peace of mind and security of there is nothing left to control or supervise, because what my wife and I were able to create, is now in the best hands.”

I return to Murcia thinking about how lucky I have been that Santiago dedicates part of his time to tell me about his life so that I can share it through this project. I sense that it doesn’t happen often or that, perhaps, no one was interested in knowing who was behind that pseudonym that signed the first designs of a brand that today, I admire more than ever.