At home with Anna Marie Periquet

The story of Anna Marie Periquet’s epony-mous home store starts and ends with her travels. The first time she went to China to source furniture for her store, she caused quite a stir with the locals who had never seen a foreigner in their sleepy town before. The place was so far-flung it took her an entire day to get there – two plane rides and eight hours of land travel broken into two days – and when she got there, her interpreter and business partner told her that people were saying, "She’s so fair-skinned it’s like an angel dropped down from the skies and landed in the middle of town."

To Anna, the experience was surreal, what with old women with gold teeth touching her skin and milling around the furniture maker’s store where she was doing business. At the same time, it boosted her confidence that she had, indeed like an angel, discovered some sort of furniture paradise as this place was the source of a number of chichi home stores in Shanghai and Beijing. To take out the middle man and be able to keep the prices down even after all the costs of paying duties to bring the furniture back to Manila – oh what a wonderful thing that was for the business! It was like playing a game of Monopoly and being told to pass Go! five times in one round and never landing in Jail.

"My idea was to come up with affordable items. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was buying from a middle man and paying mall rental fees," Anna Marie Periquet says when we complain that Anna Marie Home (AMH), located on Jupiter St. in Makati, was a little off the radar of furniture hunters. "I wanted to keep the overhead small. The customers are shocked when they find out the low prices. When I was interviewed by Margaret Jao-Grey, she even asked me, ‘Are you making money out of this?’"

A little over a year old, the lifestyle store Anna Marie Home actually started five years ago at – you guessed it – Anna Marie’s home. "Before coming home from my trips for conferences, I always made side trips to China for finds for my own house. My friends who saw the pieces would say, ‘Can we just buy these from you?’ So I would end up with nothing."

Anna would hold her home sale once a year at first. Sometimes, she’d hold white-elephant sales for things every homeowner makes the mistake of buying. Then it became a twice-a-year sale. In the fifth year, her select group of about 50 people who got invited to check out her stuff unanimously complained that they were bitin, the home sales weren’t enough to satisfy their cravings for Oriental furnishings, so they suggested that she take the next step: Open a furniture store.

"I wasn’t formally schooled in interior design or architecture, I’ve always been in hard-core business and finance, but somehow I know what pieces go together. I don’t believe in matching furniture and accessories – I hate matching! I’m a very eclectic person, even in my personal life."

So this Broadcast Communication graduate from UP, this former youth representative to Congress, and board member of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce took a leap of faith and jumped right into the retail business. After all, she was representing youth entrepreneurship in the chamber, and if there was anything she learned from her travels to Asia and Europe attending conferences it was that in business, part of one’s success has a lot to do with following your gut feel.

Anna Marie Home (AMH) takes you around Asia by offering the best furnishings each place is known for. A friend of hers offers this advice: When you’re in the store "you must open all the cabinets because sometimes there are more stuff inside that aren’t on the selling floor" – small bric-a-bracs that you may have been looking for for a long time, such as Moroccan throw pillows or Indian envelope pillows with intricate detailing.

At AMH, there are old pieces from China, ranging from 50 to 70 years. "There’s no such thing as ‘antique antique’; China will not release anything over 150 years old," says Anna.

These old Chinese pieces are sourced by her suppliers who go from house to house looking for old, unique items. It’s not dissimilar to how dealers here source Batangas antiques in the Philippines, which are some of the most sought-after because until recently, the Tagalogs felt that selling their heirlooms was a slap in the face, an admission that they had fallen to hard times.

From China are old screens, cabinets and chairs. Anna is into repurposing, which means that a piece has several functions and purposes. An old clothes closet might now be used as a bar or wine cabinet or media cabinet. Old wooden screens that used to frame windows of houses are now used as wall accents or as a scarf and bag hanger. A napkin ring from India doubles as chopsticks rest. A pashmina from India is now a table runner.

AMH also carries a lot of lacquerware from Vietnam. Anyone who frequents lifestyle stores would have noticed the proliferation of Vietnam-made items. One is because the prices are good, and second because the quality is at par with lacquerware coming from Burma, which has thousands of years of lacquerware tradition. One must remember, though, that not all lacquerware are meant to be used for eating, some are simply for display. AMH’s lacquerware are all for eating and are even dishwasher-safe.

Anna Periquet is also the distributor of the brand name Feng Shui fountain, which she sells to Rustan’s, Our Home, True Value, Sogo, Shopwise, Handyman. To complement the fountains are the textured Feng Shui candles.

"The accessories in the store make for great presents," she says. And for those really special people that are not into home stuff, Anna suggests the leather wine holders which they can display long after the Moet et Chandon has dried out.

A word about AMH’s furniture: The scale is very condo-friendly. One thing that prevents young people from acquiring old pieces aside from aesthetics (not everybody is into the old Orient) is that these pieces are almost always so damn huge. But since Anna herself lives in a condo with her guinea pigs – show champion, toilet-trained fur balls that look like multi-colored mopheads left on the floor – she understands the decorating constraints homeowners face given their small spaces.

"That’s my niche and I really wanna help newlyweds in their starter homes and also people with small spaces."

Because she herself was a shopper long before she got into retail, Anna is detail-oriented when it comes to going that extra mile to make customers understand the origins of her furnishings. Product cards are displayed on the items explaining where the pieces come from, what they’re made of, and what they could be used for.

Most of the furniture are made of camphor, fir, and pine. "For the Philippines, I prefer getting the old elm. It’s so cold in China so when the pieces are brought here, the wood moves which creates gaps," Anna explains. "With elm, there’s not much expansion. We have a lot of pieces in our warehouses and sometimes it’s scary to go back and look at how humidity has affected them."

Anna’s eye for mixing and matching pieces from different countries and different periods is evident in the way she has laid out AMH. In a corner, for instance, you will see brass knockers laid out on an old altar table fronting a contemporary upholstered sofa. Accents may be a month old, manufactured out of China, but then again she will throw an old cabinet with a lot more history. And that’s how you get a taste of the Orient without being overpowered. Sometimes, says Anna, people forget that too much of a good thing can be suffocating.

"I think the most common mistake people do when they’re using oriental furniture is cluttering up the space. I hate clutter. I just like one accent piece surrounded by simple lines. When you put so many things together, you lose the focal point. Sayang because if you surround a great Oriental piece with furnishings with equally intricate design, it doesn’t stand out, it loses its value."

Oriental furniture is really Anna’s passion, having grown up in a house with four siblings and her mom, Mary Ann Kessel Periquet, who loved antiques and collected museum pieces from China.

"My hands-on training in entertaining and fixing the home was when my mom passed away in 1991 and my dad, Aurelio Periquet, at the time was the chairman of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce. He would entertain people at home; we had guests from business, the diplomatic corps and government."

Anna is the youngest of five girls, coming 11 years after the fourth sibling, and she jokes that when "you’re a menopause baby, either you’re retarded or you’re smart. I’d like to think I’m not the former."

Until her father died in 1998, Anna was the unofficial hostess for the business dinners he hosted at home. She would decorate the place, contact the caterers and flower arrangers, etc.

"This is my baby," she says of the store. "Everyone was saying, this is really you – not you as the daughter of Aurelio Periquet."

Being her father’s daughter, Anna is still actively pursuing her roles as a business leader, having made her mark through the years as a representative of youth entrepreneurs. In March this year, she was nominated by the Department of Foreign Affairs as the representative to the SME Global Summit held in India, and most recently, she was elected as chair of the newly created Youth Entrepreneurship Committee of the Confederation of Asia-Pacific Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CACCI) during its 68th council meeting held in Cambodia. As chairperson, she will be developing and implementing programs for young entrepreneurs of the 24 member countries of CACCI.

Much of her training in business has also influenced Anna as a home store retailer. For instance, she knows what customers are looking for and at what prices. Needless to say, unlike in other Oriental home store, you don’t have to have your high blood pressure medicine handy when you ask "How much is this?" Of course, the pieces go from several hundreds for small items (a miniature armoire for P900) to several thousands for the old furniture (a cabinet, for instance, may cost around P40,000).

We begin to suspect that for Anna, the chase in sourcing the furniture – those angel-falling-from-the-skies moment – may be what Anna Marie Home is all about. It may not be "antique antique" as she puts it, but it sure as hell has a lot of stories to tell. And it starts with Anna Marie herself.

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Anna Marie Home is located at the 2nd level of 38 Jupiter St. corner Planet St. in Makati. For inquiries, call 899-8088.