A taste of the Orient

People leave their mark in the house where they once lived. This is the case in a newly reinvented house, once belonging to Digna Rosales. I knew Digna rather well during my couturing days. I remember her for her zest for life, as reflected in her fashion creations and her lavish entertaining.

With the exterior of the house painted in blue and white, the house has a Mediterranean influence. The current owner, a gregarious Pinay married to a German businessman, did her best to camouflage the excessive details of the old house, but the traces are still indelibly there.

A double main door opens into a modestly-sized foyer. As I stood there, I readily espied that the present occupant has an acute penchant for things Oriental. There are objects of current fancy from Thailand, Vietnam, and China as well as curios from Africa and Bali, Indonesia. On close scrutiny, I concluded that the lady of the house gets attached to things and she likes keeping them for sentimental reasons.

She did not find anything wrong with the way Digna had her rooms configured but because she and and her husband love entertaining, she felt the need to convert an enclosed dining room, adjacent to the large lanai, into a sitting room. Here, more visitors can gather comfortably. Using a blue-and-white color scheme, she painted the walls of the house in a lively shade of blue, which she picked from her blue-and-white ceramics from Thailand and China.

One blank wall is punctuated with a large Balinese painting depicting white ducks amid blue flora. A stylized Thai elephant chair with loose cushions covered in white linen takes the place of a regular three-seater sofa. Jim Thompson throw pillows hand-painted with elephants complete the picture.

The wide lanai is furnished with rattan furniture painted in white with loose cushions in blue-and-white chintz. It connects the living room to the garden where we find a pea-shaped swimming pool. One sees more blue and white here via the tablescapes and the plates handsomely mounted and hung on the wall. Soothed by the sound of falling water, one finds on one end of the lanai, a wall where waters cascading from three giant conches fall into the pond below.

One area in the house that delighted me most is the sitting area between the railed hallway leading to the dining room and the passage to the family kitchen. On a recessed alcove, a pair of Chinese scrolls of an emperor and his empress are framed in glass and hang above a linear wooden altar table. A "Frenchy" wingchair, covered in jade brocade sprayed with delicate butterflies, and a love seat accompany a small rattan coffee table in the center. Defining this small sitting area is a Persian carpet.

Commenting on one of the houses previously featured in Talking Design, the gracious lady of the house says she knew the owner of the house whose name was witheld upon request. "My collection is nothing compared to hers," she asserts.

But, of course, today’s popular battle cry is: "Less is more."

One good thing going for this blue-and-white house is that despite its many accessories, the lady of the house has a keen sense of propriety and order. Instead of saturating her tablescapes or other parts of the house with lots of thingamajigs, she wisely groups them either on some blank walls or in shelves carefully tucked away in certain parts of the house. This way, the house doesn’t look cluttered or dowdy. Editing is the name of the game. And here’s where a professional should come in. Taking a more objective stance, that person will have no difficulty editing out some items to make way for others.

One solution offered by a decorator friend is to have an extra room built. If no area is available, a smart reconfiguring of room partitions can be done. Then it would be easy to put some of those precious pieces out of commission. Maybe the right word is rest. Yes, let them rest for a spell. And when you suddenly find yourself wondering, "Where has all my money gone?" you need only peep into this new arsenal and be assured that every single item is there, all accounted for!

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