Designing for the family

Here’s how heaven looks like for an interior design student: Your parents have just bought a new house. It’s a fantastic structure but with an unattractive, "sansrival" interiors and exterior. Your parents own a construction company and they now want to see the fruits of their labor, er, your labor. You, whom they sent to study architecture at the University of Sto. Tomas and interior design at PSID, are now expected to put into practice all that you’ve learned from the two schools.

In short, you have a guinea pig, a free hand, daddy’s checkbook and mommy’s stockpile of furnishings.

That’s how it was for PSID (Philippine School of Interior Design) graduating student Yoan Garcia when her family moved into a subdivision in Tandang Sora last year. The house her parents bought proved to be an interesting challenge. If not for the fact that her family owns the construction firm TC Garcia, the renovation project would have been problematic since there were a lot of changes to be done. In two months though, the renovation was completed.

"When we saw the house, we said, sayang that they designed it that way," says Yoan. "No offense to the previous architect but it did look like ‘sansrival’ with its cream paint and Mactan stone on the exterior walls. When you entered the house, there was a curved glass-block wall dividing the living and dining rooms, faux finish and moldings galore. It was owned by a Chinese and designed to feng shui standards."

The kitchen had four-by-four maroon and black mosaic tiles. The furniture was "early 1990s Miami style yet the moldings were this big," she says gesturing with her hands to show about seven inches width. "And because there were so many bars in the windows, which is understandably for security purposes, you looked like you were inside a prison."

The structure of the house then and now is geometric with dramatic angles, light wells and really big windows. And they all saw the potential to convert it into a real contemporary design.

That’s how the Garcia home can be described now. Contemporary and uncluttered, with furniture designed along clean lines yet accented by pieces with more details. That’s the compromise but, as Yoan says, if she had her way, the house would be all-white, with very few furniture and nothing that remotely comes near the word "ornate."

So, it was in every sense of the word, a practice of Yoan’s profession: She was practicing the fine art of compromising, knowing when to say no and knowing when to give in.

In this case, she had to give in to her mother Peri Garcia’s wishes, who likes the more detailed stuff: carvings on the chairs and a little more formal furniture. "Our old house had very ornate pieces, you know, Italian furniture like Muebles. It had my mom’s signature written all over it. We always tease her about it and my brother calls it her Victorian era stage. My dad’s dream house is very simple. What he didn’t like about the old house was that it was too formal, and there were so many stuff like figurines. He wanted to feel that once you enter the living and dining rooms, it’s gonna feel just like that and not a showroom. But my mom is great at sourcing stuff. She’s the type who goes around the country and come home with furniture. And she doesn’t like to throw things away, so even when we sold our old house with all the furniture there, we were able to use old pieces from her ‘stocks.’"

The house is also a tribute to the family’s love of wood – particularly for Yoan and her dad Jun Garcia. They removed the marble flooring in the living and dining rooms and changed it to narra floorboards, "also old stock," she emphasizes if a bit defensively and silently thanks the heavens for her dad’s construction business.

The wooden flooring imparts warmth, a sense of intimacy for an otherwise ordinary, open-plan floor space. "My dad likes different wood finishes and for the floor he wanted the natural look best." With a coat or two of polyurethane, the flooring becomes easy to maintain right away, even with the presence of two tabby cats, Nookie and Tarsi, who are sometimes allowed inside the house. The white cat Nookie particularly likes to sit and lie around the coffee table and side tables. As for the two Golden Retrievers – Britney and Mitchieu – well, they are banned inside of the house because as we saw, the dogs were just a hurricane of activities, running all around and chewing everything in sight.

The furniture inside the Garcia home tends to be more dark-stained, like the Japanese-inspired dining table and chairs for eight and the Japanese screen in the living room; the wooden bench and the nesting tables next to the front door; the sitting area next to the landing and another pair of Filipino chairs in the living room.

The accessories are an eclectic mix of Asian designs: birdcage lamps, antique-inspired floor lamps from Old Asia, contemporary and colorful lamps from Homebound, wooden plates from PKNY, wooden pails form Art Fab, vases from Borders. Of the home stores, Yoan’s favorite is PKNY as she likes northern Philippine accessories more like the wall decor she bought and filled with candles. "I went to PKNY’s showroom in Baguio instead of the one in Malate because they have more stuff there. On the other hand, Borders is pricey but has very nice stuff," she says.

"The nice thing about doing our house is that I didn’t have to present proposals of my designs. When one part of the house would be finished, I’d do another and all the while scouting for furniture."

Of course, some situations called for diplomacy like when Yoan’s mother would dig up an old baul and put it in, say, the living room. There must have been a lot of tension, we venture tentatively. She laughs and says, "It was okay. This is the fourth house we’ve moved into. Every time we moved, my mom would be the one to fix everything, but now they let me do it, although of course there were times when she felt a little left out because my dad and I have the same taste. But we would always reach a compromise. They’re having another house built and we’re moving there in a year or two, so my mom said I could do everything except touch her sitting room!"

Actually, Yoan feels happy about some of her mom’s stuff, like her collection of glasses. "My mom has been collecting glasses since they got married in 1972. At first I didn’t like her collection because they’re too ornate and they were kept in this hideous-looking cabinet." For the new house, she got a cabinet maker to make a glass-enclosed storage unit – in a very Ikea color and style – to cover one wall of the kitchen. "Now I can appreciate her collection better."

A graduate of archi-tecture from UST, Yoan Garcia belongs to this year’s exhibiting batch of the PSID. Finally, she’s getting her degree in interior design, which was what she had always wanted to take up. "I took up architecture for my parents," she admits. "After that, I told them, yan pinagbigyan ko na kayo, now can I take up interior design? Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been interested in furniture and color schemes. Sometimes, my dad’s clients would want the construction firm’s help in the interior design, so he’d let my mom do it and when I was still in high school, I would help her out with the colors."

But, of course, armed with an architecture degree, Yoan has a very big advantage over her peers. Aside form the fact that there were subjects she didn’t have to take anymore at PSID, her architecture background helps a lot, especially in renovation projects. "I know what can and can’t be done to the structure, I know how to relocate a bathroom, things like that. Though interior design courses give a brief background, it’s still limited. My advantage is that I don’t need to hire an architect to consult with anymore."

Yoan also says that it’s not just the how-to stuff that matters, but also subjects like ethics. "In class, they’re telling us you can’t practice interior design without a license. Sad to say, in this country we have people that aren’t licensed and yet they charge such high fees. They present themselves as interior designers but they’re actually not."

As for her future plans, Yoan is considering going abroad or putting up an architectural and interior design firm. "I want to focus on interior design. It’s not that I don’t want to become an architect, but designing is more exciting for me."

Judging from her guinea pig, Yoan Garcia has exciting times ahead.