From Catamarca to the international design world, exploring the curiosity, influences and ideas shaping Cristián Mohaded’s approach to creating

On a quiet morning in Buenos Aires, I meet Cristián Mohaded at his studio in Villa Crespo, housed in a former textile factory where traces of its industrial past remain beneath its present-day transformation into a collection of creative spaces. There is something fitting about beginning here: a place built for making, now occupied by someone who has spent much of his life trying to understand how an idea, a material or even a passing observation can become something else.

Mohaded grew up in Recreo, Catamarca, where the long siesta hours of childhood left plenty of time for a curious young boy to find something to do. His mother knitted sweaters, hats and other objects; his grandmother painted at the table. He watched them work, his curiosity stirring about what they were making, and the decisions behind it — why a particular colour, why a certain gesture, why this material and not another? Long before he had a language for design, he was already interested in the process of transformation — how something ordinary could become intentional design, and how looking closely could reveal something you might otherwise miss.

That instinct has followed him from the peaceful rhythms of childhood through formal study, experimentation and an increasingly international design practice. What has evolved alongside his impulse to look is his instinct for what to create with what he finds.

Before design, there was curiosity

The siesta hours of Mohaded’s childhood, meant to be a time for rest, felt more like an invitation to find something to do. In a small city in Catamarca, there was time to wander, make things and pay attention to whatever happened to catch his eye. At home, creativity was already part of everyday life. His mother and grandmother were both drawn to making things by hand, often working with very little and transforming it into something expansive.

Mohaded watched.

The questions came naturally. Why had his grandmother chosen that particular colour? What was behind the gestures of her brush? How could inexpensive paint become a landscape with such richness in its lines, textures and light? What was happening in the mind of someone who could take a material and transform it into something else?

He was interested in the process before he had any reason to call it design.

At school, that curiosity moved into his own hands. As he grew older, the field of things worth noticing widened: fashion, graphic design, music videos, the theatricality of 1990s fashion, the colours and visual worlds surrounding artists like Björk, Garbage and Radiohead. He absorbed whatever was around him, paying attention to what caught his eye. Creation, for him, was never entirely separate from everyday life. It became a way of looking at it.

Curiosity becomes deliberate practice

By the time Mohaded reached university, fascination had begun to take a more deliberate form. He initially studied chemical engineering before moving toward architecture and industrial design, a shift that brought him closer to the kind of making he had been drawn to instinctively for years.

Still, formal education was only part of the process.

He began making things himself — lamps, stools, salt and pepper shakers — and proposing ideas to companies before they knew they needed them. He entered design competitions across Argentina, Latin America and eventually Europe, turning each one into an opportunity to make, test and learn.

There was no single moment when curiosity became a career. It happened gradually, through repetition.

“Curiosity is something intrinsic to you. Everyone possesses curiosity differently — it could be through food, film or anything else,” Mohaded says. “I’m very observant. I like to see, to understand. Of course, it’s also connected to the people, the material, the technique, and the context — but curiosity and asking questions is how you connect your vision with these details.”

For him, asking questions is part of the practice itself.

“It’s impossible to be a designer if you don’t have questions. Questions. Questions. Questions — in order to have answers.”

He laughs when describing where this tendency can sometimes take him. He can become so absorbed in his own thoughts that he loses track of what is happening around him.

“You’re floating?” someone would ask.

“Yes, I’m floating.”

There is something revealing in that moment. The same instinct that allows him to disappear into an idea also keeps him looking closely at the world around him.

Photography by ATV Arquitectos

Instinct becomes discipline

Over time, curiosity became more deliberate, shaped by formal training and the discipline required to turn an idea into something tangible. Mohaded never quite saw these forces as opposites.

“I operate from two motors — one is the industrial designer, and the other, the artist. Sometimes I try to mix both worlds, and that for me is a good balance.”

He describes the relationship as a constant dance between imagination and structure: the freedom to follow an idea wherever it leads, alongside the technical knowledge and analytical thinking required to give it form.

That tension also informs the way he thinks about originality.

For someone who has spent a lifetime absorbing the world around him, originality does not mean creating from nothing. It is closer to translation — taking an experience, an image, a material or an observation and allowing it to pass through your own perspective before it becomes something new.

The distinction matters.

Attention becomes translation

A broken object in the street might catch his attention. So might a branch, a particular texture or an imperfect material that someone else might walk past without noticing. An object can mean something new when it leaves its original context.

Mohaded is interested in those connections: the way a practice from one discipline can enter another, or how something he has observed in everyday life — even the way homes are constructed — can eventually reappear in a piece of contemporary design.

“Originality comes from the purity of your story. It’s impossible to hide the honesty of your ideas.”

His relationship with materials follows a similar logic. The material itself matters, but so does the technique, and especially the person capable of working with it.

“Material is an excuse for a designer. Imperfections of raw materials, their textures, their errors all can express sophistication for a designer’s work.”

It is a different understanding of sophistication than the one often associated with luxury design. Here, refinement comes from knowing what to leave visible: the hand, the material, the process.

Discipline becomes freedom

Mohaded’s process begins expansively. Ideas, references, materials and possibilities are placed on the table without too much concern for where they might eventually lead. Only later does another part of his practice take over: the analytical process of deciding what deserves to remain.

“What’s the most sophisticated? What’s the most interesting?”

The question is as much about editing as it is about aesthetics.

He excavates the story of a piece as the work develops, sometimes through technique, sometimes through material, sometimes through an observation that only becomes clear once the object begins to take shape.

“The process of design is not linear — it’s back and forth, like a dance. Between the project, the information, your observations from another perspective as someone besides the designer.”

That movement between instinct and analysis may explain why his work can feel both expressive and restrained. One side opens up possibilities; the other knows when to stop.

Protecting perspective

His time in Milan was particularly significant in understanding what that balance meant for his own creative identity. There, a trusted colleague offered him a piece of advice that stayed with him:

“Cristián, you are an artist. You don’t need to pretend to be an Italian designer.”

The second part was perhaps even more important.

“You are the only one who can believe in your vision. Some people will understand you, and some people won’t.”

Years later, the principle remains relevant. Before beginning work with a client, alignment in vision matters to Mohaded. The strongest relationships, including long-term collaborations with international luxury houses, are built on a shared understanding of what the work is trying to say.

That becomes particularly important as his practice moves further beyond Argentina.

Asked what distinguishes Argentine design from Europe or North America, he resists a simple answer. The influences are too numerous, the creative landscape too varied, and any attempt to define a national design language risks flattening the very complexity that makes it interesting.

What he does know is that Argentina remains central to his own work.

Increasingly, he has chosen to source materials locally — stone, clay, textiles, ceramics and natural fibres — allowing the physical qualities of the country to enter the work alongside the memories and references that shaped him.

His connection to Argentina is not something he has had to manufacture for an international audience. It was already there.

That becomes particularly clear in his work with Loro Piana, where a project drew directly from his upbringing and the landscape of Catamarca. At first, Mohaded wondered whether an international luxury house would understand what he was trying to communicate through the creative direction. Instead, the response surprised him.

“They absolutely loved it.”

There is a particular kind of validation in being understood without having to dilute the story first. For Mohaded, it became a meaningful career moment. An internationally recognised brand had embraced the work and, more importantly, understood the perspective behind it.

“The right people will always understand your perspective.”

Apacheta Collection, 2023 — Loro Piana Interiors by Cristián Mohaded: Inspired by the apachetas of the Andes, the collection explores the textures of different materials in dialogue with the landscapes of Argentina.

Apacheta Collection, 2023 — Loro Piana Interiors by Cristián Mohaded (continued)

Apacheta Collection, 2023 — Loro Piana Interiors by Cristián Mohaded (continued)

Apacheta Collection, 2023 — Loro Piana Interiors by Cristián Mohaded (continued)

Managing expectations

With international recognition comes another kind of pressure — the expectation to keep producing work that consistently exceeds what came before it. Mohaded’s answer is to stay grounded in the standards he has set for himself, regardless of outside expectations.

“I try to do my best, try to show the process and the story and all the right elements.”

He wants a design to contain everything it needs — quality, technique, material, context — but there is a point at which analysis, or “overdesigning,” as he puts it, has to end.

Then comes intuition, and with that, knowing exactly when to let go of a piece.

It is a process that brings him back to the balance he has been describing throughout his career. Discipline gives shape to an idea, while instinct tells him when it has reached its natural end. What he notices opens up possibilities; his perspective determines which ones are worth pursuing.

Perhaps that is why, after years of international recognition, Mohaded remains interested in many of the same things that occupied him as a child: looking closely, asking questions and wondering how one thing might become another.

When I leave the studio, I am surrounded by the evidence of how far that instinct has travelled — his most recognisable designs, humanistic free-form sketches and award-winning furniture pieces, all occupying the same space where new ideas are still taking shape.