As its name suggests, the new home store Casa Bella Home & Living in Bonifacio Global City has one goal: to help homeowners create beautiful homes.
Owned by young couple Joseph Tay and Stephanie Coyiuto-Tay, Casa Bella was launched last week with Patrizia Moroso, art director and owner of the Italian company Moroso.
“We envisioned Casa Bella as a company representing select premium European brands, and providing a high level of service, product and interior design knowledge for the discerning Filipino homeowner,” says Joseph.
“We choose brands that give genuine alternatives to the brands that are already on the market. As we are avid design enthusiasts, we choose brands that represent a sophisticated level of design and are luxurious at the same time,” adds Stephanie. “Of course, we only work with companies that have products of the highest quality. Moroso, Driade and Kettal have all very iconic and unique collections that represent these attributes.”
From these three brands come some of the most beautiful and easily recognizable furniture pieces in our times. Another thing they have in common is their collaboration with international designers.
Of the three, Moroso is the company that has perhaps collaborated with more designers and this is largely because of Patrizia, a second-generation Moroso, who joined the company in the 1980s and wanted to change “the style of the company by bringing in some friends of mine that were young designers and architects living very far from Italy.”
It was an important step, she says, to bring Moroso to the international stage and break out of Italy.
Moroso has collaborated with designers such as Patricia Urquiola, whom Patrizia brought in as early as 1999 and whom she describes as the designer with whom the company has the longest relationship; Ron Arad, Marc Newson, Marcel Wanders and Javier Mariscal.
Driade has produced pieces by Achille Castiglione, Philippe Starck, Alessandro Mendini; and Kettal has designs by Patricia Urquiola, Jasper Morrison and Rodolfo Dordoni, among other designers.
Barcelona-based Kettal specializes in outdoor furniture. Victor Moncho, Kettal Asia sales manager, describes the brand as having a strong Spanish aesthetic. “Our style is very timeless. We try to be different, to create something that people will enjoy using,” he says. “Even the feel and look of our pieces are very textured unlike many modern designs.”
Victor says that even though the pieces are designed for all-weather, they are very adaptable since a lot of people use them for indoors, too. “We don’t just concentrate on how a chair looks, but also on providing maximum comfort to the user.”
He adds that six years ago, Kettal started concentrating on using natural materials instead of synthetic fibers.
You see a lot of rope and fabric in their pieces, including chairs and sofas.
“In September, we will launch our own fabric collection,” Victor says. “We are always developing and innovating. Aside from our residential pieces, we also make for commercial spaces and resorts. Our collections are perfect for the weather in the Philippines.”
Three years before Patrizia Moroso was born, a 16-year-old girl named Diana and a 20-year-old boy named Augusto started a company making chairs and sofas by hand in Udine, Italy. They used fabrics, wood, and filled the sofas and chairs with with natural fibers and feathers.
They were Patrizia’s parents. It was 1952, and like many of the young people in Italy, the Morosos wanted to make something of themselves from the ruins of the Second World War.
“My parents came from two normal families but after the war, they were very poor like everyone else,” she says. “But in Italy, people’s skill for craftsmanship is very important. Everyone in every little town or village, they were making things manually.”
The time also produced what she calls a “kind of peculiarity in Italy.”
“There were many young architects who were also interested in interiors and companies that were not very big were in a position to experiment and to take risks. If you are too big, you don’t want to take risks, if you’re too small, you have no money to do it, but the mid-sized companies like my parents’ did it.
“They had fantastic relationships with architects because they were all young, in their twenties and thirties. They wanted to do something new and so it became what people would later call ‘Italian style’ — good aesthetic that’s very elegant and very well done and also very intellectual. Design is also about a culture, not just about producing a sofa. You make something with a spirit.”
In the 1980s, when she started working for the company, she would do exactly as her parents did three decades prior — to invite architects and designers to collaborate with the brand.
“You have to work with international designers to keep the collections fresh,” she says. “We try to make something new and different, a design that’s not related to something that already exists. So then, it becomes a real icon and many of our objects have become icons not just for our brand but for the designers as well.”
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Casa Bella is located at the ground floor of MDI Corporate Center, 10th Ave. corner 39th St., Bonifacio Global City. Call 470-1089, 0917-5252298.