The house’s tropical style is carried over even into the stylish kitchen, where a large marble counter is given warmth by amber ceiling lights and a playful graphic wallpaper featuring monkeys and palm trees. The kitchen is usually a private space where the homeowners enjoy their breakfast, but during large parties, the room conveniently turns into a buffet area.

The couple usually entertains small groups of 10 at the most, hosting large parties of 30 to 40 family or friends only during the holiday season. On special occasions, they enlist the help of a dear friend, Cyndi Fernandez-Beltran, the design maven behind Moss Manila and the lifestyle boutique Moss Manila Home. “We have a very similar aesthetic,” says the lady of the house of Cyndi, whom she met years ago while working on events together. “When we first met, we clicked right away. I only have to explain what I want once, and she gets it immediately.” 

SETTING THE STAGE

Similar to the entertainment room, the dining room has a very high ceiling, with a large circular table right in the middle of the space. To stay in proportion with the space’s dimensions, Cyndi chose to make sculptural and architectural oral arrangements for a recent dinner gathering using tall curly willows and large selloum leaves, injecting femininity with cymbidiums and peonies.

“When I design spaces, I need to make sure that the scale is really proportional, because I think that’s something people usually neglect,” she explains. To make the table look more like a natural landscape, she covered the marble lazy susan with bol, a type of moss specially imported from Holland.

To mirror the modern art found all around the house, Moss Manila worked with Casa Luxia, a purveyor of luxury tableware for intimate parties. Black and white chargers and bread plates from Christian Lacroix’s Sol y Sombra collection were chosen to complement the iconic art plates by Fornasetti. The stylist used arrangements of candles to add drama, and smoked black goblets to create a contrast against the crystal glassware. To give the setup an extra special feel, she also added agate coasters personalised with each guest’s name calligraphed in gold decal.

While the homeowners host more formal parties in the dining room, they usually entertain family and relatives at the poolside area during weekends. Here, the stylist employed a more casual aesthetic, using the blues and beiges of the home as her jump-o point. A er combining the homeowners’ chinoiserie vases with her own, as well as blue and white tableware from Casa Luxia, she added white and green ora to create body, finishing o the tablescape with taupe name cards and a scattering of oranges.

LIFE, CURATED

An interior designer by profession, Cyndi brings to event styling a technical point of view that many other event stylists may not necessarily possess. “When I go to a space, I already have a mental grid of how I’m supposed to organise and compose it.” She completes her transformation of the home by crafting little vignettes in each space, adding large leaves in vases on the table in the foyer, seashells on the powder room counter, and grazing stations on the living room coffee table and kitchen counter. What Cyndi adds is well-curated and symmetrical, yet looks organic and purposeful.

“I love vignette styling and staging homes,” the stylist says. “Just coming in, fluffing the house, then leaving. It feels like I’m gliding through it. And when it doesn’t feel like it’s a lot of work for me, that’s when I know that I really love what I am doing. I personally love to entertain... I go out of my way to do presentation... to me, that’s everything.”

This article was originally published in Philippine Tatler Homes Vol 23. To bring you all the latest interior trends and practical advice for styling your home, subscribe to Philippine Tatler Homes through here.