She finds joy and contentment in doting on her family and tending to her garden. Maricris Zobel reveals the secrets of making peace with her universe
From the outside, the Spanish-style home of Maricris Zobel, whose façade is drenched in the red-ochre tones of Andalucia, barely hints at what lies inside. Even as you enter, you catch only the briefest glimpse of a garden. It is only when you step into the lanai that you are able to set your eyes upon the lush expanse of green.
"I have heard this said, and I live by it," Zobel says with her characteristic warmth and candour. "If you want to be happy for a day, you buy an outfit. If you want to be happy for a month, you get a lover. But if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, you have to tend a garden."
In her beautiful tropical garden, with its Balinese-inspired pool on one side and a jewel of a poolhouse on the other, the mother of five and grandmother of five has found lasting bliss.
“A garden for me is the most relaxing, the most healing. I spend more time in my garden than I actually do inside my home! Let’s just say my kids know where to find me: they have to come out into the garden.”
Her garden is her sanctuary, a place for both contemplation and action. “I putter around, I trim, I plant. If a plant does not flower, I give it two years. If it doesn’t do well, it goes out!”
In tending her garden, she is guided by what her grandmother always said. There were two things a good garden always had: “an avocado tree, and a talcum plant. When I was a little girl, she had that Chinese powder that she mixed with the talcum plant. Smell it—it smells like verbena.”
The same care and devotion she lavishes on her garden she bestows, too, upon her family. She has five children with her husband of over 30 years, businessman and polo player Iñigo Zobel. Bianca, the eldest, has a son, Mathias, now five. Paola, who is based in Spain with her husband Santi Laborde, recently welcomed, her first-born: a son named Iñigo. Jake, who is married to Lara Reynolds, has four-year-old Olivia, and twin girls Sienna and Sydney who are three years old. Natalia still lives at home, while the youngest, 17-year-old Rocio is at boarding school in England.
She has gone through many organic and significant transformations, from young, not-quite-20 years old bride to doting mother, to indulgent and proud—not to mention glamorous—grandmother. Along the way, she not only grew in confidence about the person she w as becoming throughout the various phases of her life; she also became a committed Christian.
She was barely out of her teens herself when she became a mother for the first time. “I have three sets of children. By the age of 24, I had three kids! Then at 31, I had m y fourth, and 10 years later I had my youngest.”
Going through motherhood at three distinct stages in her life also saw her parenting style evolve. “The first three grew up with me; they were always by my side. With Natalia, I was already much more relaxed, but more vigilant about certain things in a way that I wasn’t with the older three. And with Rocio, I just enjoyed her. I grounded her more in my core values because when you’re an older mother, you just have a more serene kind of foundation and you know how to choose your battles. I was just more mature.”
Her older kids remind Rocio how lucky she is. “If you ask the older ones,” says Zobel, laughing, “they’ll say that apparently I was a much stricter mother, and we had very strict family rules that I don’t even remember!”