“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Vanessa Eckstein inherited these words as her design philosophy from her father, who, of course, borrowed them from T.S. Elliot. It’s about always experimenting,” says the Blok Design founder of her interpretation of the poet’s quote that is both intrinsic to her family and the studio she opened in 1998, a time when “design studios weren’t really owned by women.”

A native to Argentina, Eckstein has lived a nomadic life. The designer relocated from South America, moving between Los Angeles, New York, Mexico and Toronto before making the Canadian city her home base for the last decade. “For me, working in spaces where you are uncomfortable – and not the ones you know, where you fall into patterns and things become systemic – that is what is enriching.”

And in true fearless fashion, in late 2019, the designer decided to rent an apartment as a temporary studio in Berlin for two months. Eckstein convinced her team of five, some of whom had never left Canada or even Ontario for that matter, to wipe the slate clean and work remotely from the European city. Offshoring the team in the before-times did several things: it pushed them to go digital and become geo-agnostic right before COVID hit; it planted new seeds of thought as their perspectives changed; and it made the team comfortable with uncertainty (they didn’t have a workspace arranged until after they arrived).

“Leaping into the unknown is definitely who we are as a studio,” she says.