Some people come to interior design as vocation, others as artistic expression. For Maca Huneeus, the production and curation of space is a necessity of a life well lived that must be shared with others. Chilean by birth and global citizen by adoption, Huneeus resides and practices in San Francisco working with clients who one suspects are selected by her as much as she is selected by them.
Walking into her studio and home is walking into her life, a sophisticated assemblage that tracks time and place, effortlessly forming a whole that is a constant work in process.
From ski lodge to winery, the typology is broad yet it’s her influences and world travel that infuse her work with a breadth of reference that goes beyond a particular style.
We sat down with Maca to talk interiors and bringing the world to the home.
When do you start thinking about furniture?
From the very beginning. If the house is built, I typically walk through the place and try to envision what they have in mind. How do they want to use the space? Many times people don’t know, or they may know that they want to host. There is a large property that we’re doing in the Yellowstone Club. They want to accommodate 18 people in the living room, right? So, we start there. I try to bring people through different rooms and different emotions or different moods because that’s the way I live too.
What inspires you?
The new, the unknown, the fresh inspires me. It not only inspires me, it helps me also try new things and not do the obvious. Too often there seems to be a formula in design, sometimes it’s hard to know who did something, maybe because of the digital world everyone is copying each other and design just starts to look the same.
I’m realizing that the big part of my passion is the classical pieces and the history and the collecting and all of that, that goes with it. I love it. I love, love finding pieces and I enjoy putting them together.
What would be your ideal project?
My ideal project would be a hotel, probably. I think a hotel in the Mediterranean because I spend a lot of time there and I love it. Or somewhere that you can create a fun kind of fairy-tale type of hotel. Maybe Venice, I was at the Biennale this year for the opening, and I was like, “God, it would be so fabulous to grab one of these buildings.” Because I think in Europe or in the Old World you get these building that brings so much character into a project.
More work by Maca Huneeus can be found at:
www.macahuneeus.com
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