Nini Andrade Silva
True to the ninimalist style and winner of numerous international awards, this interior designer lends true soul to hotels worldwide. People are the focus of her travels.
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Bogotá, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Shanghai, Brazil … She loses track naming the countries, cities and hidden places, remembering their sound but not how they’re spelt. These are the places where she’s been over the last month and a half… or is it two months? She gets lost in space and time. She’s only aware of her itinerary in Madeira. She places herself, she finds herself. Here is her place in the world, where she belongs. She was born here, still has childhood friends here, she has people who protect and give her the strength to continue. And then, there’s the sea, an immense ocean, visible from any of her windows, which she sees as some form of flight: freedom.
People are the common thread that makes her traverse continents: her mother, who took her to Lisbon; her friends from the tapestry shop in Funchal, who encouraged her to go to the United States of America, where she was convinced that the wanted to be a designer; anonymous people she meets, and sometimes follows, even if the destination is on the other side of the world. She remembers stories, like the day she was sitting on a stool at the airport, delayed because of the snow in Zurich, bound for Indonesia. A lady, who she had met only ten minutes earlier, explained that she had worked with fur in China for many years and challenged her to continue the trip with her. She followed her in the morning. She saved around fifteen years of work in a market that is tough to penetrate. The lady sitting on the stool beside her opened up the network of contacts in the leather furniture sector. For Nini, it’s simple, she follows her intuition, let’s herself go without overstatement. For her, the world is like the ball from António Gedeão’s poem and only those who are in it, understand it.
Now, she peeks through the door glass and announces her arrival. She is dressed in white, from head to toe, with the exception of a black stripe on her hat. It’s almost always like that; she wears white or black, so as not to overshadow the creative act. She gives hugs and kisses, the act of someone who has been away a long time. The assistants at her Funchal studio give her a run down of her agenda in half a dozen sentences. She has ten days of islands ahead of her. Yes, islands within the island; places like the Jardim do Mar, which shelter her.
Selling feelings
When she’s asked the recurring question – “What do you do?” – she replies like a young inexperienced designer: “I do hotels around the world.” Nini Andrade Silva loves hearing that “wow” of surprise. At the Cordoaria Nacional, in Lisbon, for a particular exhibition, she had to design a hotel hall in one night. The last-minute-girl (as she is known to her team of 40 people) set up “a veritable cathedral,” which earned her an invitation to do the interior design for the Aquapura Douro Valley Hotel, as well as international recognition. In the United Arab Emirates, at another exhibition, she was regarded with disdain by her peers for displaying just a metal frame covered with fabric. At the inauguration, when she pulled the chords and revealed a seven-metre high construction, “they were taken aback: Wow! I like grand projects. Our space had nothing, it was like a cave. It just had a projector and the floor was water, and the people walked over the water. What could we sell? A feeling.”
Whether it’s a customer or a particular audience, she always finds it hard explaining that, despite creating a variety of images for the same space, its essence is not lost. Once, at a hairdresser, she was preparing for a design and hospitality congress in Porto, wearing a wig to convey that very idea. With experts in attendance, Nini was an unknown with the long black wig. Her talk was about the soul of places and the impossibility of changing it. Once again, she showed that soul is one thing, another is image, and this can be different, amended, re (invented), for this to happen, you have to provoke a feeling in those who you wish to enjoy it. Nini took off her wig and was suddenly blonde: “And her soul? Is it, or is it not the same?” She repeated the experiment with a red wig at the World Festival of Architecture, and with different hair colour, the performance continues to baffle audiences around the world.
The silence and the space
Currently, the Nini Andrade Silva studio has hotel projects in Bogotá, in Luanda, Bali and Singapore. In Portugal, in Serra da Gardunha, she is developing a hotel/old people’s home. And a new challenge: a university in Kuala Lumpur, the city where she will soon be opening a studio – a bridge to Asia, her great inspiration, and the continent she most visits Bangkok is her favourite city. The simplicity of the people. The smell of ginger. The flowers. The flowers that are put in water to give thanks to Buddha for what has happened during the year. Yes, they are put in the water, not thrown, Nini learned about the politeness of the Thai people. However, above all, what she loves most is the silence: “It occupies space, unlike in Europe. Here, it often causes embarrassment.”
In Bali, she also enjoyed the silence (the nyepi) and the day the Balinese dedicated to this cause, and which leads to greater reflection, to find the “me”. On silence day, the last day of the year, which occurs in March in this part of the world, not even airplanes can fly over the territory. When she arrived on the island during this homage, Nini went off to discover the place with a driver who spoke no English. Various colours, many people dressed in flowers, masks, also drums, a sound that doesn’t interfere with the inner silence of this day.
In China, which she first visited 18 years ago, few people spoke English. One day, close to Guangzhou, three men stuck to her like glue just to learn English, “Speak, speak, say what you like. When I left, they hooked up with other foreigners.” But this story of language and solo travel has provoked some trepidation, if only momentarily. Some time ago in China, when she was trying to find a relics market to find decorative details to use in her original designs, she ended up at a hotel where nobody spoke English. After escaping a rather dubious man, she took refuge in her room, which had no light and where whenever she picked up the phone, people only spoke Chinese. For half an hour she sat there asking herself “Now what do I do?” The first time she went to the Philippines, she didn’t receive the warmest of welcomes: a terrible thunderstorm, dogs sniffing the car, men wanting to open her bags, the strangeness of feeling completely alone.
They tell her that there’s a lot of this Asia in her work. Nini agrees: the colours, the textures, the light, the objects placed precisely in a given place, which appeal to the contemplation of silence. However, as she is constantly highlighting, the soul of what she creates boasts a diversity of images. If she’s in Bogotá to work on a hotel, she likes trying to deconstruct images, like those of violence and the drug cartels. She walks through the city; she feels it. Only in this way can she build different images that sell the feeling. She doesn’t create a project without knowing its place, its context.
The Vine hotel, in Funchal, is already an international design benchmark and those who go there are faced with symbols of Madeiran identity. “It’s like a museum of Madeira.” In the floors, the sinks, the baths, taps, you can find the levadas, the stones, the wicker carts … Her work in this hotel – which won an award for interior design at the European Property Awards 2009 (in 2008, her project for the Fontana Park Hotel in Lisbon also won an award) and the Best Suite from the European Hotel Design Awards in 2009 – earned her praise from Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat, which moved her to tears.
Her style, recognized by her peers as ninimalist, can be seen in her biography, which will be published in 2012 by a New York publisher, which has also been responsible for the publication of biographies of other famous figures, such as Carolina Herrera and Coco Chanel.
By Ana Serpa
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