Interior designer feels right at home in Buenos Aires

WILDGEESE - EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERSON ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD: Susan Kennedy, Principal, Susan Kennedy Design, Buenos Aires

“I HAD A flight back to New York after six weeks and I just simply didn’t take it, says designer Susan Kennedy of her impromptu move from the Big Apple to Buenos Aires two years ago.

For the Sandymount girl who left Ireland just weeks after her graduation in 1995, putting down roots in a foreign city was nothing new. While studying German and philosophy at UCD, a green card lottery win saw her move to San Francisco. She describes herself as the last of a generation of “presumptive emigrants”.

While the job scene in Ireland had started to pick up, she says that, for her, emigration was “just a sort of well-beaten path. I was sort of raised in the culture of that.”

Though always interested in fashion and design, in San Francisco Kennedy got sucked into the tech boom and spent the next 10 years working in Silicon Valley. Working for companies including Knight Ridder, the then parent company of newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury Newsand the Miami Herald, helping to bring the titles into the digital age, Kennedy describes the culture in the Bay area at the time as "wild".

“I was there through a period when investment was coming in all over the place,” she recalls. “There was a frenzy of investing in companies that people didn’t really understand. The more of a fresh pup you were, the more money they were going to give you to develop new products.”

But by around 2001, the tech crash brought such giddiness to a halt. While her job was unaffected, she says social life in the Valley took a noticeable dip.

“People had crazy party budgets and would rent out nightclubs. There was always stuff going on. Then, all of a sudden, people were more conservative and were cutting back,” she recalls.

She decided to take four months off to travel around Central America. The trip was, for Kennedy, a breather to decide how to act on a persistent niggle to follow a more creative path. “I was looking at the future and thinking ‘is this really what I want to be putting all my energy into?’ I just felt I had a more creative calling that wasn’t being addressed.”

Helping out at a friend’s art gallery on her return to San Francisco enabled her to get a feel for what it might be like to work in a more creative field. Going back to study interior architecture and working part-time in a high-end Palo Alto furniture store while continuing to juggle some tech consultancy work solidified her decision to switch tack.

Over time, the store, from which she sold $250,000 worth of desks and chairs to Facebook – “they were hiring like crazy” – provided a platform from which to build her own client base. In 2005, Susan Kennedy Design was born.

But, by the end of 2006, “an itch and a curiosity” about New York City got the better of her and she moved east. The move proved to be “almost as much a culture shock as moving from Ireland to San Francisco,” she says.

“I found it a very different culture and a little shocking, to be honest. It’s a much more intense city and a much more money-driven city.”

She spent three years in New York, working on design projects including the revamp of trendy Tribeca apartments, Upper West Side brownstones, and – far removed from diddly-eye – a fit-out of the stylish Lower East Side Irish pub, Donnybrook Bar.

However, with the economy taking a knock in 2009, forcing clients to put projects on hold, Kennedy took the opportunity to travel to South America. The decision proved fateful.

“From the moment I got to Buenos Aires, I fell in love with the city,” she says of the Argentinian capital. Drawn in by its architecture, parks, tree-lined streets and the energy and friendliness of the porteños, she says: “I liked it so much, I just stayed.”

She built up her business by networking with everyone from the local hairdresser to the Peruvian restaurateur on her street, as well as mining the ex-pat scene. Her most high-profile assignment so far has been the design of a stylish boutique hotel that opened in December. She met her Argentinian partner while working on the project, and the couple have joined forces to launch their own furniture brand, Red Fox, this month.

Argentina is currently enjoying a boom, and Kennedy knows many in her field who have travelled there and found work – though there are some cultural foibles to be grappled with. “A lot of business is done by personal connection. People will give work to an unqualified cousin faster than they will to a qualified person they don’t know,” she says.

And in an economy that has known many booms and busts, there can be a more short-term view of business relationships too.

“I think here it’s a little more hand to mouth. It’s ‘how can I get as much as possible from this transaction right now?’”

Another hazard is fluctuating inflation rates, which can cause the cost of materials to rise by 20 per cent in a matter of months. And high levies on imported goods, put in place to protect Argentinian jobs, mean that “an Italian fabric might be twice as expensive here as it is in New York”.

That said, Kennedy loves her new home and says graduates now facing emigration should not be daunted.

“Think of it as putting hairs on your chest,” she says. “That experience of living in a different country and dealing with new challenges and people – you will be the stronger for it.

“And Irish people, I’ve found, are made welcome everywhere.”