Stefania Vasques. The search of beauty as aesthetic value

Stefania Vasques, artist, designer and stylist talks about home decoration, her work, her ethics, and even ceramic.

1. What are the main trends in interior design and home decoration at the present time?

As far as I can see, in recent years trends reflect the needs of an increasingly cultured, more demanding and more ethical contemporary man. The beautiful has become objective for everybody, something healthy that does pollute or poison and which respects everything and everyone.

Style has become understated but, at the same time, warm, enveloping, “clean”, sophisticated, minimalist, necessary, elegant, classical.

Places seek history, they become increasingly cultured, knowledge is stratified also through the use of natural materials, earth, clay, lime, saturated colours.

Colours are neutral, reassuring, black, white, burnt browns, but at the same time they also seek a refined sobriety and a reinterpretation of our classical culture. I would define it as an eclectic neo-classicism, inspired by prehistory and classicism right through to the study and search for new forms associated with industrialisation, with a reinterpretation of all of the forms tried and tested since the 1920’s. The pieces by the greats of design are reinterpreted. We seek new futuristic forms.

2. What are the advantages of ceramics for an interior designer in your opinion?

Ceramics follow the requirements of the moment, they interpret them, they even anticipate them. They provide a product that is the fruit of a creative process attentive to the recycling of materials, with new technologies that make it possible to faithfully reproduce all natural materials. An exceptional product that is the fruit of a high quality, cultured and sophisticated research process.

Stone, marble, lime, concrete and wood are reproduced. Fine, very fine ceramics that are even warm to the touch.

I am lucky to work for a company like Marazzi that produces an incredible product that encapsulates all of these qualities.

I have been able to watch the creative process relating to new materials and the attention to detail of every member of the highly demanding and specialised team that designs the new collections and carries out all of the working phases through to the final production.

This specific knowledge makes it possible to create a beautiful and easy-to-manage material which, as well as being long-lasting, does not impoverish our planet and is therefore also “beautiful” because it is ethical.

3. In what areas is your research currently focused? What projects are you working on?

My goal as a designer is to create useful,  essential products that encourage informed use and perhaps also some form of reflection.

The quest for beauty also as an ethical value; the ethical process as the basis of an idea on which the things that acquire value also for the creative process that generated them are formed. Creation with artisans, the sharing of knowledge and expertise with respect to production times like a process of taking back time, imperfection as value added.

Reinterpretation and use of poor but noble materials: paper, ceramics, wood, iron, cement and even just simply the quest for beauty.

When we have beautiful thoughts our minds rejoice.