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.
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.
We collaborate with designers and clients to create beautiful pieces that reflect the ways they like to live.
Taking a creative, ego-free, and collaborative approach we help clients realize their aesthetic vision, shepherding projects from start to finish for hospitality, commercial, and residential projects.
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.
Her designs have appeared in 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 Award, IIDEX/Neocon Innovation, and Neocon Gold Awards for her rug and fabric designs, and her work adorns hotels and homes the world over, as well as health care facilities, like 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 Parsons’ Gimbel Library, and she has created cover art and illustrations for 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, studied textile design at F.I.T., and painting and drawing at Cooper Union in New York. She holds an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work.
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, injustice, and neglect.
To me, that cosmic indifference coheres around the most vulnerable of beings, children. How can happiness exist when there are children enslaved, starving, abandoned, overlooked, let alone thousands of them?
The juxtaposition of bright, optimistic colors and threadbare dolls from another era — who also started bright and hopeful — throws 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.
