Holler & Saunders, Ltd.
Symmetry, Scale, and Drama
An approach to Spanish Colonial and Latin American decorative art built over four decades, and unlike anything else in the trade.
Holler & Saunders, Ltd. was founded in 1979 by Edward Holler and Samuel Saunders, purveyors of Spanish Colonial furniture and decorative arts from Mexico and South America. What began as Edward Holler's personal pursuit of prime examples of Mexican Colonial and folk art evolved, with his partner Samuel Saunders, into a full expression of maximalism: grandeur, scale, symmetry, and bravado, always in service of the finest Latin American Colonial furniture and decorative arts they could find.
Long before the internet made research effortless, the two traveled extensively through Latin America, tracing not only its colonial centers but the trade routes that shaped them, chief among them the Acapulco–Manila galleon route, which ran once a year between Acapulco Bay and Manila Bay from 1585 to 1820. Following that route into the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies of Asia revealed how deeply those cultures had shaped decorative art in the Americas, and led them to seek out colonial pieces carrying a distinct Asian influence.
That research led them toward Colonial Revival styles, as well as pieces of their own design, produced by master artisans in Mexico and South America. Samuel Saunders carries the business forward today, with a more minimalist expression of that original maximalist philosophy. For over 40 years, Holler & Saunders has followed this global story of colonization, the indigenous interpretation of European styles carried into the Americas and Asia, collecting decorative art, architectural components, and furniture that can now be experienced in Nogales, Arizona, on the border with Mexico, and online through HS Reserve.
They always said that there are no rules.C. Michael Diaz
To consider Holler and Saunders primarily as antiquarians of a Spanish Colonial tradition would understate them; their scope of interest runs wider than that. They are not designers, either: design, as a discipline, is too limited a tool to explain their results. They are not aesthetes in any conventional sense either, having separated themselves from established style and taste long ago. And they are not visionaries chasing some particular end. Working from what amounts to a self-imposed exile in Nogales, Arizona, they simply operate at a different level, with a distinct set of rules they had to write themselves.
Those rules begin with symmetry: establishing it in a space from the floor upward, through walls and ceiling, using pairs and multiples of furniture and objects, sometimes as many as sixteen. Once symmetry is established, it is pushed further through large, grand, and exaggerated scale, which clarifies the intended effect and creates room for layering. Sam Saunders has described it as taking roughly seven layers to build the ideal composition, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, and once, memorably, a single layer of giant spheres crammed into a courtyard. That layering is what lends the work its theatrical atmosphere.
Every element chosen to fill that layering (furniture, object, painting, mirror, sculpture, chandelier, chair) is selected outside of conventional judgment, guided instead by scale and multiplicity, which together demand a different sense of proportion: an elongation of profile, a reinvention of form, a deliberate play between positive and negative space. That instinct is exactly where their affinity for Spanish Colonial and derivative styles comes into play.
That tradition of deviance and reinterpretation runs deep in Latin America and parts of Asia, wherever European colonization took hold between roughly 1520 and 1820, producing a rich Folk-Baroque style ranging from the highly academic to the naive and primitive, from opulent ecclesiastic and viceregal work to the sober civil, from near-facsimiles of European motifs to those retaining pre-Hispanic form. Holler and Saunders draw constantly on these traditions, knowing precisely which examples are needed, how they should be used, and where to find the best of them.
Color and lighting receive the same rigor. The rule on color is simple: never use a half-measure. When quality is high enough, everything matches: cobalt blue with white, oxblood red with gold, amethyst with silver, emerald green with black. Lighting extends that same symmetrical discipline, balancing downlight and uplight so that even shadow falls into a kind of cinematic order, without resorting to the decorative shorthand of a lamp base and shade.
The result is a living quality that runs through everything Holler and Saunders touch. Photographs struggle to capture it; it has to be experienced in person to be understood. Eddie and Sam have one word for the effect they're after: drama. Where that drama comes from is, by their own account, beside the point. They have never been especially interested in their own history; they are more engaged by the work in front of them, and by what comes next.
Adapted from an essay by C. Michael Diaz.
Experience the Collection
The full effect of Holler & Saunders is best experienced in the showroom in Nogales, Arizona, or browsed online through HS Reserve.