Earlier this year, we visited our favorite yarn shops in Buenos Aires as we started to design our Fall collection.
One afternoon I took a trip to Estancia Villa Ocampo, the former residence of Victoria Ocampo, an Argentine writer. The Villa was built in 1891 and restored in 2003, now functioning as a UNESCO Cultural Center.
Originally the summer house of the Ocampo family, it became Victoria Ocampo's permanent residence in 1940. The house is famous for its list of distinguished visitors who came to Argentina invited by Victoria: Rabindranath Tagore, Igor Stravinsky, Le Corbusier, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Federico García Lorca, André Malraux, José Ortega y Gasset, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Saint-John Perse (Alexis Léger), among many others. Villa Ocampo was also a regular meeting place for Argentine writers, among them Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who met there for the first time in 1931. It was the inspiration for the Blue Villa in Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous.
The Villa was built in 1891 by Manuel Ocampo, Victoria’s father. Its architecture is eclectic, combining influences of British and French origin. The house is surrounded by an 11,000 m2 historical garden and hosts an important collection of art, furnishings and a library of 12,000 books, photographs, letters and personal papers of Victoria Ocampo.
The house has been owned by UNESCO since 1973. It was fully restored in 2003 and is now a cultural center open to the public. It welcomes guests from around the world and hosts meetings for distinguished groups such as the Fulbright NEXUS group in 2011.
The copper walls and pale teal trims inspired our color choices for the season, introducing a new tone to our Pampa collection.
