The Argentine example
Tile with style
I’ve been thinking an awful lot lately about why I was so affected by Argentina.
First, it’s an extremely sensual place. We were in Buenos Aires, which is sort of a cross between Paris and Havana or Jamaica, if you can imagine such a thing. It has the grand boulevards and cafes and parks, and the Guimardesque light standards of Paris, but mixed with the lively chaos and lovely, crumbling rot and poetic decay of the Southern hemisphere. The parks are overhung with bougainvillea and other mysterious and brilliant coloured flora, much of it strangely oversized. The crazy above ground cemetery where Evita is buried, which is called Recoleta, has narrowed streets of mildewed crypts like the cemeteries of New Orleans, but more ghoulishly Latin. And the smell of jasmine in the air at night was almost overwhelming.
We stayed in a hotel in Palermo, which is an absurdly chic and happening quarter. Every block of the sprawling, two-story residential neighbourhood ended in a curved 19th edifice, with a crumbling plaster garland façade, which was re-purposed as a groovy restaurant, café or bar that would be hopping with cute people until 3 and 4 in the morning. None of these places would even get started until 10 or 11 at night. Every self-respecting establishment had a parilla, or wood-fire grill, which smelled delicious. And then of course, after a couple Pisco sours and glasses of Malbec, you tuck into a giant slab of grass-fed Argentine beef.
The first couple of nights we were there we stayed at this incredible estancia in the middle of nowhere in the Argentine pampas called La Isolina. The first morning we awoke, I thought I was in a nature park the birds were so loud, and then so frighteningly large. Like the birds (we saw a chiflon, for example, which was this bright yellow bellied thing with a slate blue back the size of a very large stork just hanging out by the pool), the trees were all just a little bit off –at first glance like what one might see in North America, but then not really.
And then there’s the Argentine style, which in contrast to any other country as physically remote and vast and relatively newly founded, (like, say, Canada), is so developed and extremely refined. Rough beautiful timbers and weavings and tiles are everywhere, mixed with leather, of course and iron and shearling. It is very de rigeur to mix primitive rough materials in the most minimal, modern interiors. Sofas are usually draped with Indian weavings (of course I have one now, on my family room sofa, together with French check gingham and rough calico). The food too, had this gorgeous rugged simplicity and élan. My new style hero is South American celebrity chef Francis Mallmann who we discovered in his remote and extraordinary restaurant in Uruguay (more on that later) and his approach to preparation and presentation is so pure and earthy and almost brutally real that it seemed to be a harbinger of a whole new vibe.
My takeway is that Argentina, populated as it is by largely Italian immigrants and many other Europeans who came in the 20s for land and jobs, somehow managed to become this new world that combines the best of continental style and sophistication with the casual ease and youthful energy of the Americas—in other words, Europe, or more precisely, Italy, but without all the crap.
Which is of course why I now desperately want to move there.