Horse Country

Polo champion Nacho Figueras builds a dream house—for his prizewinning ponies.

- Derek Blasberg

For a serious art collector, one’s home must double as a gallery, a sacred place to showcase prized possessions. For professional polo player Ignacio “Nacho” Figueras—long ranked among the top players worldwide—that rule applies to his stables in the Argentinean city of General Rodríguez, a 45-minute drive outside Buenos Aires. “These horses are our art collection!” he declares. The stables hold 44 world-class polo ponies—which can fetch prices similar to old master paintings—in a strikingly contemporary, environmentally conscious structure. “We wanted to create a place that was practical, yet as inspiring as an art museum.”

Beyond its singular purpose, Figueras’s building is remarkable for its modern design sense and how seamlessly it interacts with the environment around it. With its grass-covered roof on which the ponies graze, unaware that their pens are just below them, the 38,750-square-foot structure is nearly unnoticeable to the naked eye. “Everything that we took from the earth to construct this building, we put back,” Figueras says proudly, noting that only the horses and greenery are visible in aerial shots.