A Polo Star’s Stylish Family Home

Ralph Lauren model and polo sensation Nacho Figueras creates a modern family home outside Buenos Aires


Written by Jeffrey Slonim • Styled by Carlos Mota • Photographed by Miguel Flores-Vianna • Produced By Jeffrey Slonim





The facturas, or Argentine tea cakes, served at the home of international polo star Nacho Figueras and his wife, Delfina Blaquier, are fluffy and light with creamy dulce de leche centers. No wonder they are a favorite of guests, not to mention the couple’s children, Hilario, 10, and Aurora, 5—though Artemio is still too tiny to enjoy them.

Tea is taken on the terrace, with views of a polo field beyond. Figueras’s low, modernist house is located 45 minutes from downtown Buenos Aires, in an area that has become an epicenter of the sport, with literally hundreds of fields. “You could buy a place here and not play polo,” says Figueras, the cofounder of the Ralph Lauren–sponsored Blackwatch team, who also stars in ads for the designer’s menswear and colognes. “But why would you?”






When he was ready to break ground, Figueras turned to Juan Ignacio Ramos, an architect he had first encountered at the age of 17 in the horse barn Ramos was building for a friend. “You’re going to design my house one day,” the teenager announced that morning, and a decade later the dream came true. “Ramos isn’t just an architect,” Figueras offers. “He is an artist who makes houses.”

The straightforward geometry of the structure makes it seem almost like a work by Tadao Ando, the Japanese minimalist, but Ramos says he looked to the region’s colonial heritage. “We kept the historic European houses of the pampas in mind,” the architect says. “The design is simple: stucco on the outside; the floors inside are concrete or an indigenous hardwood called incienso. Big stone walls, very private.”

“The pampas houses had towers,” Figueras adds, “in case of native attacks.” So here a tower rises above a long wall that shades the residence. This one is not fortified, however, but contains an art studio for the multitalented Figueras and is full of his abstract canvases and Blaquier’s black-and-white photographs.

The design of the property, which features a walled garden, was overseen by Blaquier, who studied landscape architecture. “She brought in the pasto llorón, weeping grass, from her father’s farm in the west,” Ramos says. “Nothing manicured.”






“We also moved boulders,” Blaquier adds. “Some of them literally weighed a ton.”

The interior showcases Figueras’s boldly gestural and vividly colored paintings and Blaquier’s oversize photos. An intense red-and-orange canvas hangs above the fireplace in the living room, where a punchy red leather Chesterfield sofa found at a flea market in Buenos Aires is paired with a classic Le Corbusier chaise upholstered in cowhide. In the hall, pride of place goes to an abstract still life by Gustavo Serra—a member of the Escuela del Sur (School of the South) movement founded by Joaquín Torres-García, which Figueras particularly admires.

The prominently placed trophy in the media room was won by one of Figueras’s mares, Chicago, so named, says Blaquier, “because she has white socks on her back legs.” The two long benches that flank the dining table were a labor of love. “I drew our carpenter a sketch,” says Blaquier. “Then my cousin, who designs shoes, took me to a leather market outside Buenos Aires’s Boedo neighborhood for the hides of Criollo, or Creole, cattle.” The leather-and-steel chairs at either end were originally created for Ramos’s grandfather by Antonio Bonet, one of the architects behind the iconic Butterfly chair.






After some cajoling, Blaquier shares snapshots of Estancia La Concepción, her family’s sprawling French-style country house that could be the setting for a Ralph Lauren ad. “My father inherited his mares from his father, who was a really good player,” she says of the dashing Juan José Silvestre Blaquier, who died at the age of 43, in 1958, while piloting his new plane.

Clearly, polo runs in the blood of both members of this couple, as does a bit of daring. It seems there’s nothing they won’t attempt. Blaquier designed the behemoth bed in the spare, masculine master suite and had it sheathed in a delicate veneer of difficult-to-mill walnut root. Above it is an abstract-nude photograph from the series she exhibited at Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in 2009.




Some of the furnishings have backstories that could have come straight from a Gabriel García Márquez novel. “In 1992, a tornado knocked down 100-year-old trees at our family farm,” says Blaquier, as she points out a piece on a console. “A cousin sculpted this beautiful rounded form from the felled timber.” Her brother, Eduardo, also a sculptor, crafted the undulating totems that soften corners throughout the house. The cardboard Frank Gehry Wiggle chair in the master bedroom was the find of the decade, snapped up for $2.50 in a Buenos Aires junk shop—“He didn’t know what he had,” Blaquier says. Some treasures cost even less. The bleached cow skull that leans against the tiger-striped ebony paneling in the entry was found in a field last year by Hilario, who, having stopped for tea, is now running late for his own polo match.