That future involves entrepreneurs like Estefanía Cardona. Her concept store, Casa Kiki, is a few blocks away from Ocho y Media, down a cobbled street in a little heritage house. It stocks a highly curated collection of clothes, jewelry, books, and art, but it also functions as a gallery and event space. The offshoot of a lifestyle blog, the store, which opened in April 2021, continues Cardona’s project of sharing stories of Ecuadorian designers as a way of “changing the culture of how we consume,” she says. “We’re not here to get you a size or tell you the price, though we do that too, but to tell you the story.”
Cardona walks me around the all-white space, talking knowledgeably about each designer, like Hera, which uses natural materials and dyes or up-cycled textiles in its brilliantly bright unisex garments, or Kayamamas (previously known as Allpamamas), an all-women brand working with Indigenous artisans to create breezy natural designs using ancestral techniques. Cardona credits the advent of social media for the recent boom in young design talent in Ecuador as it provided an outlet to sell and market work independently. Previously, she says, it was “easier to fall in love with a designer from another country than appreciate the artisans from our own.” Casa Kiki fosters this appreciation, while also creating a space for the community that shares it. As I leave, I’m invited to a book talk that evening from the country’s leading transgender activist.
This collaborative approach between contemporary designers and the country’s rich Indigenous artisanal history was widely popularized by the Olga Anhalzer Fisch, the late Hungarian Bauhaus artist who arrived in Quito by boat after fleeing World War II. Fisch was inspired by the work she encountered while traveling through Ecuador, and it became her mission to support and preserve Indigenous art through her gallery and shop, now the flagship Olga Fisch Folklore store in La Floresta (it still has a secret gem of a museum upstairs). Those traditions influenced her own textile work, too—she found fame when the director of New York’s MoMA discovered her rugs—and to this day, the label works with local artists and artisans to create its designs.
Margara Anhalzer, Fisch’s grand-niece, a distinguished designer herself and now president of what has grown into an international brand, says young Ecuadorian designers are now returning to their roots. “People realized it’s important to tell these stories,” she tells me, stopping to show me a shigra (a bag handwoven from natural fibers) comprising the work of Indigenous groups in the Otavalo and Cotopaxi areas. “You see how much talent there is here?” says Anhalzer. “That is the wealth of this country.”
This celebration of the uniquely Ecuadorian carries through to culinary culture. At the bustling and bright Somos in La Carolina, which opened in 2020, chef-owner Alejandra Espinoza creates wildly inventive dishes under the motto “Ecuadoran born, globally inspired.” The most memorable? The chontacuro, an Amazonian grub around the size of a thumb, grilled to perfection and served with a palette-cleansing bouquet of herbs. “Hold the head and eat it in one bite,” the server tells me. Its crisp delicate skin gives way to a gooey interior, which tastes earthy and vaguely of pork. At Foresta, which opened in 2022 in La Floresta, chef Rodrigo Pacheco grows many of the ingredients for the hyper-seasonal tasting menus in his rewilded food forest in Pillagua, demonstrating the country’s immense biodiversity.
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Both restaurants have staggering interior design. While Somos is defined by its bright wraparound mural from Ecuadorian artist Apitatán, the indoor-outdoor Foresta is a minimalist greenhouse with looming volcanic-rock structures that double as cooking surfaces. The latter is envisioned by rising star architect Felipe Escudero, who worked in London, Beijing, and New York, before returning to Quito (like many of the young creatives I spoke with) where he’s helping to put the city on the global design map. Here, he says, he was able to take on projects of a grander scale and execute them faster than he could elsewhere in the world with less restrictions to navigate. Over dinner, he shows me his designs for the yet-to-open Quito Contemporary Arts Centre—a futuristic white cube placed within a collapsed historic house in La Floresta.
