Making or renovating a house is a very special process in which it’s essential to combine the needs and tastes of the client with aesthetic and practical considerations. Design must offer both solution and beauty, and authenticity must always prevail over what’s fashionable. But we are so absorbed by the constant bombardment of trends that we end up losing the sense of what we really like; of our own identity. “Essence is more authentic and genuine than a trend,” says Rebeca Pérez, making sense of all this chaos with projects that exude harmony, style, beauty and comfort.
Founder of Tabula Rasa Design Studio, the Ibizan designer Rebeca Pérez has been creating beautiful spaces for 14 years, from plans to furniture to decoration, although she does maintain that you have to “leave space for what life can bring; life changes (luckily!!) and it’s nice to be able to adapt a house”.
From a very young age, her overflowing creative talent led her to embark on very diverse projects. She studied special makeup effects in Barcelona and worked in local television, fashion, music videos and in several movies. She later studied interior design at the Ibiza School of Art. For 10 years she was in the Pacha Group designing sets, costumes, head dresses and even costume jewelry for the parties, and, later, restaurants, boutiques and Pacha franchises in places like Moscow, Berlin and Brazil. She remembers that time of intense work with great affection as it taught her how to come out winning,to deal with stress and also the capacity for improvisation and resolution that a construction process requires, which, “is always stressful because there are many jobs and teams coordinating at the same time and there are many decisions to make…something always happens”.
She left Pacha when she became pregnant, going on to develop projects more focused on interior design in Atlant del Vent with the architect Jaime Serra, her partner at the time and the father of her two children. When separating from Jaime, with whom she maintains excellent family and professional relationships, Rebeca founded her own studio, Tabula Rasa, at the end of 2019, whose name is inspired by that “clean slate”. This new and exciting beginning coincided precisely with the outbreak of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, which did not prevent Rebeca from planning a kitchen that April, confined at home.
Since founding Tabula Rasa, Rebeca is committed to the use of natural and artisanal materials – “artisanal has another flavor” – for sustainable construction that takes care of our fragile environment, and to working with local companies, with professionals such as Walter Baute from Herrería Salvador, the ceramics of Magma Sólido, the carpentry of Albiol Modular, the gardening of Marcos Tur or the home automation provided by Estudio Áureo. As a defender of the importance of comfort, that which cannot be seen but makes everything work, she is passionate about home automation, allowing you to customize the light or even the smell of a space.
This Ibizan woman with her restless mind affirms that her work is quite like that of a psychologist, her eyes lighting up about each one of her projects. The last one, she enthusiastically tells us, is the renovation of the Michelin starred Portuguese restaurant 100 Maneiras, by chef Ljubomir Stanisic. She also tells us about the project she is most proud of, the Sa Mirada house, made entirely of formwork concrete: “a real challenge, it’s like making a sculpture, you can’t go wrong”, and is looking forward to the opportunity to apply home videomapping; “imagine having dinner with ivy growing on the wall”.
