Openhouse magazine, ISSUE 18Inma BuendiaEnglish

CASA JOSEPHINE

Openhouse magazine, ISSUE 18Inma BuendiaEnglish
CASA JOSEPHINE

WHAT THE HEART DECIDES

The most interesting things that happen to us in life are probably those for which there is no set plan; the things that happen when we let our hearts lead us. That is how Iñigo Aragón and Pablo López Navarro came to open a guest house in Sorzano, a village in the Spanish region of La Rioja, some fifteen years ago. “We wanted to combine our fields of experience: Iñigo’s as a designer, and mine as someone who had worked in tourism up until that time,” Pablo explains. “We searched everywhere in La Rioja, finally buying this house from an aunt of Iñigo’s grandmother.”

They called it Casa Josephine, in honor of its former owner. Decorating the house in their own taste, they allowed experimentation to guide them. Over time, Casa Josephine has turned into a business spanning many other aspects. The most important activity is the interior design studio, but the pair also have a shop in Madrid where you can find unique items, and a second, newly opened guest house in the province of Segovia.

This exercise in style, through which Pablo and Iñigo unabashedly expressed their ideas at the time – embodied by the house in Sorzano – became Casa Josephine's calling card in the world of interior design. “We had no experience at all in interior design. The only thing we did was buy furniture and create a house in the unique style we were able to achieve at the time: with good decorative solutions, colour and second-hand items. It’s good to know the theory and then be able to disregard it. We didn’t know that. We learnt it a little at a time and along the way. Actually, I believe not knowing the theory was helpful for us,” Pablo points out. That house was the project that put them in the spotlight, but for Pablo and Iñigo it belongs in the past. “It’s good because it continues to be fun, and it’s part of our story, but that's a closed book now.”

Their learning process is ongoing and is encapsulated in everything they undertake. “I look back and see that there’s a line, an artistic direction, which is Iñigo’s, and it can be seen from one project to another. But we’ve never started out from the same place. We’ve never wanted to do a house like the one before. We always focus on the client, on the space, and on what interests us at that moment in time.”

“For us, the process is the most important thing because it’s all about trial, error and learning.”
— Pablo López Navarro

Fifteen years after making a name for themselves as a studio, Iñigo and Pablo’s way of working largely continues to be playful, with emotions at the heart of their particular discourse. “For us, the process is the most important thing because it’s all about trial, error and learning. It’s during the course of the project when we ask ourselves whether we’re doing a good job, whether we’re doing the best we can, or whether we could do a little bit more. We have a way of working that I believe is really different. Everything is a debate. Each decision. To a point where it loses its practicality,” Pablo jokes. “Although I don’t mean that if we knew how to do it in an easier way, the result would be worse.”

Iñigo and Pablo’s shared project came about long before it was called Josephine. They met while studying art history at the University of Valladolid, and once they had completed their studies, they moved to Madrid. Perhaps the seed for the creation of Casa Josephine stems from back then: “For five years, we held two pop-up shops a year at our home, one in spring, and the other before Christmas. The doors to their special open house were opened on nine occasions: “We'd decorate the space with new ideas, and everything was for sale.” Ultimately, a mini interior design project was created for each occasion. Their work was picked up by the media, and they gradually started receiving commissions. “Once we had a good number of projects, we set up the studio.”

They are now excited about focusing on designing furniture and household objects: “The idea came about out of necessity. Very often, we'd find that certain items didn't work in the space we were designing, so we started making them ourselves.” The ISÈRE rug and RUTE sofa are the first designs by Casa Josephine. “The new year is going to be the strongest year for product design. The idea is to sell in the shop and find retailers in other cities and countries.”

Despite being at a very good moment in terms of their career, Pablo cautiously and modestly eschews the condescending comments that stories like theirs often seem to elicit: “We aren't an example of how to do things from an economic point of view, or anything else of the kind. We’ve both taken a plunge into the pool, but it's our pool, and if failure is the result, then it'll be ours. That gives us the freedom that anybody who designs anything from scratch should have.”

That freedom is what makes Casa Josephine such a special project. A place where Pablo and Iñigo invite us to play, let ourselves go and discover how this is the way life – very gradually and naturally – shows us our place.