Esther Stella Scherer, founder and creative focus of Scherer Design Concept, was born in Manila in the Philippines and has lived in various countries in Europe, Asia, and the USA. Early on she discovered her passion for seeing a deeper meaning in lovely things, and her love of creative designs.
Numerous stays abroad and travels in faraway lands, combined with her fascination for different cultures, have been an important source of inspiration for her since her childhood. For example, at the time she found her parents' frequent moves to be a repeatedly new and extremely exciting inspiration for her interior design projects.
When Esther Stella Scherer lived in Miami, she let herself be inspired by the Anglo-American idea of acquiring pieces of furniture in their reconstruction phase so as to design them from scratch and later sell the furniture and selected objets d'art and decorations together with the creative effort.
Back in her adopted country, Germany, she took up this idea and founded Scherer Design Concept. In close collaboration with architects and craftsmen from the region, Esther Stella Scherer gave objects in need of restoration a makeover, and above all, a new lease of life.
She buys carefully chosen pieces and items of furniture for the design directly from craftsman at international trade fairs and in galleries, and even likes combining Asian art with modern design classics – the Bauhaus meets ethnic cross-over, for example, is her personal favorite style.
As a result of the contacts she has built up around the world over many years, she can import goods directly from producers from many different countries. In this way, she can source special and unusual items and materials directly that can only be obtained with difficulty in German shops. v What emerges in the overall work are livable stage sets, stage sets that in fact also serve over and over again as the backdrop for film shoots. Among others, scenes from Simon Verhoeven's comedy film, Men in the City (Männerherzen), with Til Schweiger were shot in one of her Berlin subjects. Even international stars like actor and movie director, Jackie Chan, and director of the science fiction film Matrix, Andrew Wachowski, have hired subjects designed by her in the past.
It is the personal moments that bind Esther Stella Scherer to her clients and that give things a history. "I try to cast our clients under a spell from the very word go so that they respond enthusiastically to the creative process. This is why we don't show pieces separately, but only within the context of the entire property, and in fact, from the outside to the inside so that the design is coherent as a whole.
Different concepts may even be mixed bravely with each other. For example, functional design in high-quality design or a precious material possesses a timeless, aesthetic quality and this can be combined beautifully with ancient or unusual art if the colors harmonize with each other. A piece of art, or a special object like, for example, an unusual rug, can then even be in the focal point of the design."
Esther Stella Scherer loves the interplay of details from different styles and cultures. "It is always important to me to have a clear direction as regards the colors or materials and to mix a maximum of two styles with a single coherent color concept.
Bringing together objects from different cultures and distant lands is her trademark. Recognizing the beauty in very different things and creating harmony from this is her individual strength and is really her hobby.
Another idea was born of this and that was to use the cultural heritage and inspirations of almost forgotten peoples in a range of jewelry. Inspired by this idea, she has been designing high-end collections for jewelry firm, ESVARA VIVA, since 2014.
In 2017, her dream of designing her own rug art collection became a reality under the name of "Rug art by Stella". Based on its positive reception, laborious designs which took weeks to complete were handmade (Fair Trade) in wool, silk, and TENCEL® to exhibit them for the first time at the international specialist trade fair, Tendence, in June 2017.
