Emma Balch – Latin flair
Auteur : Esther | 11-06-2010
Emma Balch is a fantastic interior decorator in Buenos Aires. She does a good deal of travelling, the past year alone she spent six months in India and two in the Netherlands before returning to Buenos Aires. These travels influence her interior designs and also inspire her to custom make objects that she can’t seem to find on the market. This includes these fantastic ‘Boca Chairs’ that you can find at the store Anthropology.
I’m personally in love with her Buenos Aires living room recently featured on Design Sponge.
How did you come to be a designer?
We moved to Buenos Aires in 2004 and bought a loft in an old corner shop and set about turning it into a home. We bought from an Argentine couple who lived next door and who had renovated several corner buildings in the area, and they gave some good contacts. Through these I found others, and spent my first year in Buenos Aires pounding the streets, finding artists and artisans hidden away down passageways or in little known neighborhoods. By word of mouth I started doing the interior design for foreigners who had bought in Buenos Aires and wanted help transforming their property into a high-end rental home, but with character and individuality.
Aside from your work as an interior designer, I’ve read that you also like to create unique objects for your clients. Can you give us some examples?
Yes, this really came out of the lack of buy off the shelf shops in Buenos Aires. At our loft I had almost everything custom made for the place. It's relatively inexpensive, and I had fun with it. So, for the dining chairs I had a blacksmith copy a simple iron frame chair from the flea market, I found a place that sells sheets of plastic, and another guy who turns it into spaghetti like wire, and then had two ladies in their 70s who usually work in wicker and rattan to weave the wire around the frame. I had several orders for these spaghetti chairs, including one from a big production company for their garden. I have a thing for two-seater couches, I'm always drawn to them in the flea market, and I've reworked a few for clients, which you can see on my website: www.dobleMdesign.com
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
It's a cliché, but travel. Not in the sense of me wanting to do a Marrakesh style terrace in Buenos Aires, but I find a doorway casually painted in two vibrant greens in India and pick out those shades at a paint shop in Argentina and redo a tabletop and legs in the same combination. Museums, galleries, shops, cafes, I'm noting things all the time, but it's walking in the streets that inspires most, or in the hills, or along the beach and taking inspiration from nature.
Which interior or furniture designers do you most admire?
The Argentine designers I have met who weren't set back by the huge economic crisis in 2001/01 but instead returned to traditional practices or materials and combined this with their creativity and resourcefulness to spark a new wave of design. I have huge admiration for their determination to find a way, and for not letting limited opportunities, lack of finances or a country in chaos stand in their way, but rather gave them a greater creative edge.
Do you have a signature mark that you always try to implement in a space?
Colour! I often go in thinking how calming a neutral palate would be and then I find myself hanging around in the fabric shop in the corner with all the bold colours. My eye is always drawn to any splash of colour. I think it suits my cheery personality! I do like things to look very natural though; it grates with me if something looks fabricated or fake. I like things to be unique too. There are lots of styles I love, but I don't want to copy that exactly, I can take elements from places or designs I like, but I have to make it my own. None of the places I have designed look the same. I don't recreate the same look over and over again.
What is your dream home? Or what is your ideal living space?
I'm a bit of a nomad. I can't stay in one place for too long. I like so many different styles that moving around gives me the chance to enjoy different types of living spaces. So in the last year I spent six months in a grand art deco mansion in Kerala, in south India, furnished with wonderful antiques, then two months in the simplest of wooden huts in the Netherlands, and now I'm in our apartment in Buenos Aires in a beautiful building built at the end of the 19th century for the English management of the Argentine railways. It's a combination of Notting Hill and the set of Evita! All three of these are 'dream homes' for me, but in different ways, and for different reasons.
What are your current projects?
I'm looking for a property for an English client - to buy, do up and rent out as a short-term luxury home. There's a big market for that in Buenos Aires. I'm also putting together a 'handpicked - by doble M design', an evolving collection of hand made and typically Argentine products from designers, artists and artisans I have gotten to know over the last six years. It will be a limited, one-of-a-kind collection, that will be updated each week on the handpicked blog. I'm offering a free delivery service in Buenos Aires, and there will be private viewings.
Emma Balch
dobleMdesign@gmail.com
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