BOUNDLESS BEAUTY: THE ENIGMA THAT IS ISABEL LOPEZ-QUESADA

By SATISH BABUSENAN

Photo Courtesy: Architectural Digest

To Isabel López-Quesada, aesthetics has always been an integral part of life. Her work exemplifies this idea, as does her life.

It is said that as a little girl of 13, Isabel discovered the sheer pleasure of wanting to create beauty in the space all around her. And to this end, she started her own design practice at the young age of 20.

Isabel’s style is eclectic and influenced by her extensive travels all over the world. Her projects span the map with some spectacular work in America, Japan, France, Spain and so on. She is widely acclaimed and was crowned Architecture Digest’s “Best Interiorist of 2012”.

Photo Courtesy: Isabel López-Quesada

IL-Q, as she is known, believes that Authenticity is at the very heart of Design. You have to find and reproduce the essence of anything and that makes for authentic practice, she feels. She has said that one has to feel the genuineness of a project when one wanders into a designed space. It is this commitment to her vocation, and her attention to detail which have made Isabel López-Quesada an iconic designer of our times.

The romantic poet Shelley wrote that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. Isabel goes in a slightly different direction. She loves the beauty that is resident in all things, both new and old. It is a near mystical approach to the art of Design and this can be seen in the way she recognises no differentiation between the Exterior and the Interior in her perception of living spaces. The concept of creating a unity in the Interior and the Exterior is close to the idea of Zen, where the dividing mind will ultimately dissolve into silence and the undifferentiated will shine in its pure form.

Photo Courtesy: Isabel López-Quesada

As Isabel says, “In the end, what we designers do is, we don’t just create a space, but we create a way of living.” Now isn’t that quite something?!