As realistic —everything she draws is stackable, small or versatile— as idealistic —more focused on the future of the planet than on her own—, Inma Bermúdez (Valencia, 44 years old) lives in the Valencian countryside, in a house with a swimming pool where his mother, who has a house next door, grows tomatoes.
Associated with her partner, the architect Moritz Krefter, trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Bermúdez grew up celebrating fideuás on Sundays and wants her children, Otto and Carla, "raised as wild as possible", to enjoy and not work on Sundays.
His is a story of pain and triumph.
What is the prize, professional success or family love?
It's clear.
But without mythologizing: I don't know if I could have achieved this family without the respite that comes from being financially independent.
Being able to keep you is being able to be.
They call her Inma Smart (list)…
The Swedes gave me that nickname because I made a small sink that would fit in any bathroom and had a towel rack and space for toothbrushes and soap.
All for a few euros.
It was my first design for Ikea.
I thought I should make life easier for families in a hurry.
Do you have it at home?
I have a version.
But I don't need to have everything I do.
I like to let go, get rid of things.
When you have children, you accumulate, and that overwhelms me.
I am happier with little.
I need the void.
My partner needs the opposite and… we agreed.
The Ekrar coat rack, which he designed for Ikea, became drip holders during the pandemic.
Ikea offered furniture.
And the medical team reported what he needed.
The coat rack was light and served.
How much?
I do not know.
Little bit.
24 euros.
Do you care what your products cost?
It makes me angry that Ikea products, if they are worth little, do not arouse people's appreciation.
Ikea is said to produce consumerism.
But it is our way of valuing or not valuing the things we have that produces it.
It seems that one cannot fall in love with a vase that costs one euro.
I design the same for Lladró as for Ikea.
With the same quality?
In a glass vase, of course.
Isn't consumerism generated by excess supply?
Everything helps.
But the last responsible is oneself.
Not being able to control yourself because of low prices is taking the blame off yourself.
Ikea is an achievement for those who can pay little.
"I'm exhausted.
I'm going to use the money from the National Design Award to stop.
To think.
I want to be accurate with what I contribute”. Raúl Belinchón
Would we rather have a lot than good?
We are intoxicated.
The pace of fashion consumption has reached furniture.
It is difficult to get out of that circle if you do not realize that the Earth is dying.
That this summer Spain burned!
What is it that we do not see?
I only exculpate those who need to survive.
One who has cancer cannot think of anything else.
But the companies that advertise with their supposed ecology...
You don't stop designing products.
Do you live in a contradiction?
I try to get out of it.
I design less and less.
I think more than I propose.
And what does he live on?
To understand design in another way.
To try, for example, to make everything that surrounds wine in a winery sustainable.
Dominion de la Vega already has organic farming.
They called me to report it.
I dispensed with the capsule, changing it for a sealing wax, and in cava, which associates the weight of the bottle with a higher price, I reduced the amount of glass in the container.
It is a tradition without practical sense.
We don't design a new one;
we take advantage of existing molds.
Sustainability is also choosing between what is there when no more is needed.
Is not doing a radical position?
Sure.
Let's see, I believe in life and opportunities.
But I always start from insecurity.
An insecure woman who changed even the name of the wines.
I am of emotions.
I wanted to relate them to the winery.
They wear those of the partners: María's white, Abel's red...
What is your relationship with wine?
It's the party.
My grandmother had very little money, but she drank cava with fideuá on Sundays.
Lives?
He died when I was three years old.
We lived with her and my uncle until my mother was able to buy a flat from her.
And his father?
Was never.
Didn't you know him?
Phew.
The story is very Catholic Spain.
My mother studied nursing and she got a place in Totana, in Murcia.
There she met my father, the son of a wealthy family called Maestre.
She got pregnant and my father ignored her.
In order to marry a rich heiress, my father had to promise that he did not have a daughter in Valencia.
Although everyone knew that he had it because my mother had gone pregnant to the communion of my father's little sister.
I grew up with my grandmother, my mother, my uncles Juani and Pedro and with babysitters.
Then I became a wild one until I did a group therapy that turned everything upside down.
What stirred you?
I understood that the need for them to love me at all costs came from the emptiness I had after their rejection.
And he wanted to meet him.
My mother accompanied me to Murcia and waited for me in a bar.
I looked in the phone book.
I looked in the mailbox: Miguel Maestre Maestre, there she was.
Call the door.
She asked me who she was.
I said that she was 21 years old and she called me Inma.
She asked me what she wanted.
I told him to meet him.
"Well, you've already met me," she replied.
And she closed the door.
I cried everything and went back to where my mother was.
Then he died.
He was never able to have children.
How much of your life did the absence of your father decide?
The first two decades, a lot.
I was trying hard to like it.
Until I realized that all my problems had to do with abandonment.
My mother's name is Benilde (daughter of, in Arabic).
She had felt abandoned, because she is the daughter of another father who left, and she bears my grandmother's last name, like me.
When she told me that she too had felt abandoned, I hated her with sheer helplessness.
She recriminated him that instead of helping me, he told me that this pain would pass with my life.
I started using drugs.
I got to have such a negative attitude that my boyfriend told me that if I wanted to continue with him I should go to therapy.
My mother and I went to Proyecto Hombre.
It cost me a lot.
At first I lied all the time.
Until I accepted their rules.
That saved me.
Therapy made me see.
And he wanted to see his father.
Yes. Start from scratch.
How many times can you start from scratch?
Every time you need it.
The important thing is to see it.
And admit it.
I spent half my life looking for the love I hadn't had.
And when I assumed that I was not going to find it in my father, I found it in friends, in my mother and in myself.
And then he changed his life.
In 2001, at that very difficult time when I was faced with everything: boyfriends, studies and my mother, with whom I have lived all my life, I got an Erasmus scholarship.
I went to live more than to study: I marked all the possible destinations.
And Germany came out because nobody chose it.
I thought that with everything I had experienced, learning German would be easy.
It was?
To design, yes, I wasn't going to study microsurgery either.
'Socke', Inma Bermúdez's dog and, along with him, his bestseller, the Follow Me lamp produced by Marset. Raúl Belinchón
In Germany you appear as your best design.
I guess.
There I began to build the life I wanted, not the one that had touched me.
I stayed four years.
And there I received a call from my father's family.
They did want to meet me.
Life is amazing.
Suddenly I met a bunch of cousins.
They took me to meet my grandmother.
The woman said, "You are a Master."
And she hugged me.
Two years later my father died.
I cried what was left.
I had fantasized that he would regret it, that one day he would want to talk and explain something to me.
But not.
That's why when my relatives called me so that my father's land wouldn't be taken away by his widow, I said I didn't want anything.
Just recognition for my mother.
They exhumed the body and I won the paternity suit.
When did you become financially independent?
For many years I designed and worked as a waitress.
She was used to it.
When I was a rebellious teenager, my mother, who is a nurse, got me hired to clean on the oncology floor.
Everyone should go through that: to clean and to live with those who have little hope and strive.
I've been a waitress in a restaurant, a pensioner's home, nightclubs... whatever you want.
And I've always had a good time.
It's a matter of being positive.
There is always something good.
Was it more difficult growing up, becoming a designer or raising your two children now?
I did not want to have children without having a stable professional life.
I got it when I returned to Valencia and started working for Lladró and Ikea.
But I have been very lucky.
The Follow Me lamp has made me a lot of money.
It is an invention: mobile, without cable, with several screen positions and low consumption light.
I did it out of affinity with the director of the Marset company.
He told me: “Someone capable of working for Ikea and Lladró has to be special.
What kind of lamp would improve life?
I thought, and in the end I found it in the old catalogs of his company.
There was one with a metal handle and I upgraded it.
Design is choosing?
Of course.
But the one he chose was Javier Marset, the director of the company.
He asked me for an autonomous lamp.
There was a gap in the market.
Can you live off a single product?
It has given me peace of mind, an economic mattress and a precious relationship with Javier.
It has been a success for both of them.
Real life defines his designs: a small sink, an easy-to-assemble coat rack.
I have always lived in small spaces and with little money.
That makes you think about what you are going to spend it on.
She is very realistic, but lives isolated from reality in a bioclimatic house.
Professionally, I am meticulous;
Personally, I act on impulse.
Also today, with two children?
It is part of my character.
Her studio is called Inma Bermúdez.
And you and your partner, the architect Moritz Krefter, work there.
I did not seek to have my own studio, I wanted to design without obsession, to have a life.
But when I returned to Spain I had to open it.
It is named after me because it existed before I met Moritz.
For nothing else.
Everyone says that behind a great man there is a great woman, and I, who came from a terrible experience with men, do not know if I am a great woman, but I know that I have a great man behind me.
What a different woman the one who left and the one who returned.
I found strength to face what hurt me and then I went to work.
Her mother has not stopped accompanying her.
Never.
Who accompanied her in childbirth?
Moritz and my mother.
She as an operating room nurse [laughs].
Why did you return to live in Valencia?
For the good life: I needed my land, my mother and my friends.
The good life after living in Sweden working for Ikea.
What is the good life?
The sun, the slow pace, the flavorful tomatoes we grow, the feral children.
His house has no air conditioning, no heating and is almost finished.
It has a wood stove, cork insulation, 40-centimeter walls and large windows.
They are the most expensive in the house.
What sparked your ecological awareness?
Live in Germany.
Notebooks of the designer. Raúl Belinchón
What has been more difficult for you, establishing yourself professionally or raising children?
Phew.
Nobody warned me that having children after a certain age was very complicated.
I suffered several miscarriages.
Then they sewed up my uterus so that Maria wouldn't come off.
But she died.
We have a laurel planted in the garden that is Maria.
In this country, when you abort at 20 weeks, they throw the fetuses into a bucket.
That should change.
One should be able to bury their dead.
I was a month without moving.
And I didn't even save her.
But they don't consider it mourning.
Nobody supports you.
At 38 years old, Otto was gestated with preventive cerclage.
That cerclage caused me to have a threatened abortion.
After removing it, and six months of absolute rest, he was finally able to be born.
I tell this in detail in case it helps someone.
Because they don't talk about the problems of childbirth.
Nor of the passing of the years to become a mother.
She says that work saved her.
I had an order from Mercadona to make the cleaning line: dustpans, buckets, mops... I designed it in the hospital, where I didn't get out of bed for 18 days.
Everything fit together, it took up little space at home, on the pallet for the transfer...
House brand.
I learned it from Ikea.
And it was neutral so as not to invade, so as not to become very visible.
How have you experienced raising your children?
My mother and uncles have helped us.
But I'm exhausted, so I'm going to use the money from the National Design Award to stop.
To think.
I want to be accurate with what I contribute.
I want to help mitigate the problems of climate change.
I think I have the facility to see solutions and I want to do it from another point of view.
It's not just about doing things.
At the Dominio de la Vega winery my advice has been to do fewer things.
Smaller, more significant.
That is also design.
It is from the re generation: rethink, repair, recover, recycle.
Is the party over in design?
You have to learn to celebrate in another way.
I find it indecent not to react to what is happening on the planet.
Everything: from turning on a tap to catching a plane or going to the hairdresser has consequences.
What else needs to happen?
Can't we see that with this rate of consumption we are going to hell?
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