The Company
Established in 2002, emma gardner design, llc is a leading American home fashion design house. The company’s core business is couture area rugs that are hand-made in Nepal and GoodWeave certified. We also have select licenses for the manufacture and distribution of broadloom carpet, cement tiles, and fabrics.
Design Statement
"Inspiration does exist, but it has to find you working." - Pablo Picasso
Through the endless permutations of color and design, a rug can embody the personality of the room: passion, trend, art, joy and self-expression all at once.
I adore my work and take a special pleasure in collaborating with designers and clients to help them translate the ways they like to live into beautiful pieces that will reflect those deeply felt inclinations.
I take a flexible, ego-free and intuitive approach to our custom design and colorations, shepherding projects from attentive start to satisfying finish.
To me, a client’s art and their rugs and tiles are the perfect places to introduce color and design. Subtle or bold, design and color = passion. That passion is the clearest manifestation of an essential self, and while it can undoubtedly be shared, it starts with the individual.
We work with big design firms and small, on hospitality, commercial and residential projects, and have made rugs for athletes, celebrities and taste-makers around the world, but all our clients and customers receive the same dedicated attention in their efforts to beautify their surroundings and their lives.
I keep a keen eye on our ever-multiplying design world, but always strive to make designs that will endure. From creating unique and lasting palettes for clients and customers, to bolstering much-loved trends for greater longevity, I like helping people express themselves better and more fully, through color and design.
About Emma
Award-winning designer Emma Gardner, principal at emma gardner design, has been creating striking and vibrant rugs for consumers, interior designers and architects since 2002. After a successful career as an editor and illustrator, she has applied her celebrated sense of color and composition to creating original rugs, available directly to interior designers and clients anywhere in the world. She also has a large collection of sustainably produced, hand-made cement tiles for residential and hospitality use with Granada Tile.
Her designs have appeared in leading design and fashion magazines including Elle Décor, House Beautiful, Interior Design, Better Homes & Gardens, Traditional Home, Elle, Glamour, Dwell, Luxe Magazine, House Beautiful, Cover, California Home + Design and The New York Times.
Gardner has received Interior Design magazine's Best of Year, IIDEX/Neocon Innovation and Neocon Gold Awards for her rug and fabric designs. Her work adorns hotels and homes the world over, as well as premier health care facilities, including the Mayo Clinic.
Prior to her career as a designer, Emma Gardner was the Editor-in-Chief of PHYS.COM, Condé Nast's online Health and Fitness magazine, served as Managing Editor of Better Health and Producer of the Food Channel for publicly traded iVillage.com and in 1996, she founded, designed and edited her own "e-zine" for young women, Smarty-Pants.
Gardner's handmade book, Man of the House, was exhibited at Parson's Gimbell Library as part of a group show and she has created cover art and illustrations for numerous publishers and publications including Villard Books, Random House, Scholastic Inc., and The New York Times.
Her early education was at public schools, including New York's Stuyvesant High School. After earning a B.A. from Wesleyan University she did graduate work at Columbia University in English Literature as well as studying textile design at F.I.T. and painting and drawing at Cooper Union in New York.
Gardner was born in Kyoto, grew up in Brooklyn and Westport, CT, before moving to New York City at eleven. She currently lives and works in New York City with her husband, Patrick McDarrah, who is president of the company.
She pursues fine art as often as she can.
Artist’s Statement
I am drawn to the idea that everything in the universe, to a cellular level, unfurls continuously in time, and that we surface briefly like a small wave in that infinite fabric. It’s only because of the inextricability of consciousness that our arrival feels like a beginning, whereas in fact we are only waking into a scene that has been underway for millennia and will continue with equal dynamism without us.
And while this life itself carries the potential for such joy, the darkest and most unthinkable energies manifest themselves no less forcefully.
In art, I try to dwell in the paradox that some of us exist happily and others, at the same exact time and for no reason other than accident of birth endure horrors, poverty, unjust wars, terrible injustice and neglect.
That cosmic indifference to me coheres around the most vulnerable of beings, a child. How can happiness exist when there are children enslaved, starving, abandoned, overlooked, let alone thousands of them every day?
I am especially drawn to forgotten children’s toys as a symbol of that indifferent karmic expansion. To me, the juxtaposition of bright optimistic colors and threadbare dolls from another era — who also started out bright and hopeful — throw into relief the chasm between hopeful innocence and life’s indiscriminate cruelties.
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Our Mill in Nepal
emma gardner design is partnered with one of the finest Nepalese producers of Tibetan carpets, a mill that keeps alive the tradition of a centuries old native craft while incorporating the latest techniques and expertise for color-matching and innovative constructions. Hand-carded, hand-spun and pot-dyed, Tibetan or New Zealand wool and the finest Chinese silk, are hand-knotted to produce rugs with a unique luster and generations-long durability.
The possibility for customization is vast -- from design, to materials and construction techniques, variations in pile height, knot count and combinations of wool and silk, getting it perfectly right is what the company does. The mill is also able to make rugs of almost any size and shape.
Certified by GOODWEAVE, with whom we have partnered since our inception, our partners never employ children and have been recognized for their progressive employment practices, winning numerous awards for excellence from the Nepalese government.
