Baccarat Beauty

Nina Santamaria was scouring catalogs, looking for kitchen cabinetry that would go with her client’s house, a modern classic. Classic because the retired clients, both in their sixties, had heirloom furniture in dark, hand-carved hardwood that they wanted to keep. And modern because their kids wanted something contemporary, fresh, and bright, for which the family decided to engage modernist architect Aris Tan, who brought Grupo Santamaria Interior Designers into the project to collaborate.

“When you say you’re looking for a classic kitchen, ‘classic’ encompasses such a wide range of styles. So initially, the models being recommended to me were whitewashed shabby chic, country, Shaker, and French Provence. But the ornamentation in all was a bit overdone for what we needed.”

As soon as Santamaria clapped eyes on Scavolini’s Bacarrat kitchen, she knew she had found the one. “I have never seen a model like Baccarat in all the other suppliers in all the other showrooms. It worked because it matched the house—sleek but classic in the small details.”

Mother knows best

Deciding what the client really wanted wasn’t easy. The father was nostalgic for the 1960s and said the house he grew up in had an avocado green kitchen. “I considered it because I’m open to wild ideas like that but in the end, he was out-vetoed by the kids who said they would tire of the color. The kids were pushing for a super modern white kitchen kasi everything in the house is classic. ‘Can’t there be one part of the house that’s purely modern?’ They were saying.” The mother, on the other hand, wanted whatever would go best with the house and, of course, that made the most sense especially because of the kitchen’s location.

The hearth of the home

Scavolini’s Baccarat kitchen is where the family always congregates. Its windows look out to the street and front gate. From the main entrance foyer, they go straight into the kitchen through a door to the left. The helpers, on the other hand, have access to the Baccarat kitchen from the pantry and service kitchen, which they can access from the garage.

The Baccarat kitchen’s sliding doors open to the formal dining room and when the dining room’s doors are open, the kitchen is visible from the living room. So when one of the kids is baking cookies or a special dish, they can chat or easily saunter over to friends and family in the dining and living areas. The kitchen’s centrality to the family’s gatherings and comings and goings mandated a design wholly in sync with the rest of the interiors. So let’s take a quick tour of the house.

Modern classic interiors

How did Santamaria pull off a harmonious mix of opposites? First, of course, she collaborated closely with the architect, who maintained some motifs of classical architecture, albeit in streamlined shapes and profiles. The doorways are gently arched, for example, trimmed with flutings but without the typical keystone up top and the capitals, volutes, and other ornamentation found on Greek and Roman columns. Instead of elaborate cornices, Aris Tan used sleek covings to outline the wall heights. The coffered ceiling in the living room and tray ceilings in the other rooms repeat the rectilinear patterns established by the wall moldings and wainscoting.

Because of the dark, heavy staircase, Santamaria chose an aluminum frosted glass doorway instead of a solid wood door to close off the living area and keep the foyer from feeling somber and ponderous. A similar pair of lightly frosted glass doors likewise closes off the Baccarat kitchen from the dining room.

The all-white canvas with its refined details makes a fair backdrop against which the parents’ dark and sumptuous vintage pieces stand out. “So in the living room, the grandfather clock and coffee table were the givens. The sofa, pillows, side tables, ottoman, and graphic rug are all modern,” says Santamaria.

“The dining set is from the 1970s, I had it reupholstered. They had one china cabinet but could not assign a place for it in the new house. I insisted that it would work nicely if it was a pair. So, I had it replicated by JB Woodcraft from Pampanga. They were so happy with the reproduction because it was so finely made.” The twin china cabinets stand on either side of the frosted doors to the Baccarat kitchen. 

Color harmony upstairs

Because the parents are avid art collectors, Santamaria had many of the pieces reframed with simple borders and straight edges. Up in the bedrooms, where Santamaria used color to reflect the clients’ personalities, she mixed new with old pieces by staying true to color harmony principles.

“I used pastel macaron colors, purple, blue, and sage green—Marie Antoinette-inspired hues for the walls and neutrals for the rugs and upholstery. Imagine if I used a Persian carpet in the master bedroom. It would make the room darker and more formal.”

The parent’s matrimonial bed is the star of the second floor, around which Santamaria’s choices in the master bedroom revolved. “I really had to study the decorative ornamentation that would talk to each other and to the art. They had maybe 50 paintings that I assigned to the different spaces in the house and had reframed because all were in heavy wood framing. If you notice the painting in the master bedroom—I didn’t want its ornate frame to compete with the bed, so I changed it to a simple silver frame that modernizes it.”

And back to the kitchen

“So, transitioning to the kitchen, how do we make it modern and classic? How do we make the kitchen blend with the antique furniture pieces surrounding it? I really searched several showrooms before we found the Baccarat collection. When Brian Hontiveros presented me the Baccarat, it was one of their pricier collections, but I knew it would work.

“The top of the cabinets has crown molding. The brown fluted pillars match my clients’ antique furniture and the flutings of the arched doorways. That’s that detail I like the most because when you push that medallion on the fluted pillar fronts, that whole brown panel pops out to reveal racks inside. The frosted glass matches the living and dining rooms’ frosted sliding doors. Oh, and the gold trim was a plus factor. The gold touches add that elegance I was looking for; it connects to the other rooms, which all have metallic touches.”

There was some debate about Baccarat’s height. The clients wanted the cabinets to reach all the way to the ceiling for additional storage space, but Santamaria talked them out of it. “I said, assuming we find a model that goes all the way to the ceiling, what would you put in there and how often will you get on a stepladder to take it out and return it? After some thought, the clients realized they didn’t want to be getting up and down ladders in the kitchen.”

Working with Scavolini

“I like working with Scavolini, honestly, because when they send their proposal, it’s very detailed. They send the floor plan, the elevations, and axonometric views so you can see all the drawers, cabinets, pullout racks, and so on. They really were very helpful in helping us figure it out. I arranged two or three meetings between the client and Scavolini with me present, guiding the client in relaying her wish list to Scavolini. And then from there, they send a proposal which gets revised, oh, maybe four or five times. And it’s never a problem, they adjust, like when the client wants to move the appliances around.

“I prefer the first meeting with the client includes Brian because the owners like to know who they’re dealing with. Brian personally deals with the Scavolini team in Italy, so he tells the clients about the factory, the history, how they work.”

Brian Hontiveros is the general manager of Modularity Home, which distributes Scavolini in the Philippines. “Then after the initial meeting, Brian endorses us to a kitchen specialist. They assign me one person and it’s all technical from thereon. We exchange floor plans, proposals, revisions are done, it keeps getting refined and refined until we reach that final design, and then, there are negotiations on the price and timeline until everyone’s happy and we reach an agreement. Then the signing and the payment happen.

“The average design time for a kitchen like this is sometimes a month because there’s so much back and forth between client, supplier, and designer. I don’t find it stressful, not at all. I enjoy hand-holding clients and finding out what they really want. At the end of the day, I want every client to feel they were listened to,” says Santamaria.

Modular systems

Modularity Home is one of Asia’s best distributors of Scavolini. Their secret is providing clients the kitchen they want, and that means Modularity Home and the interior designers they collaborate with mix and match elements from different Scavolini styles and models. Baccarat, for example, comes in four versions: black gloss lacquer with silver details; white gloss lacquer with gold details; maroon with dark panels; and a wax red option.

Hontiveros explains: “To achieve this kitchen for the client, Nina and Modularity Home combined the white gloss version with the dark details of the maroon version. So, you see those brown pillars and cornices outline the white cabinetry. We don’t just copy what’s in the catalog and paste it in the house. There’s creativity involved in giving the client what they want while doing justice to each model’s DNA and what Scavolini communicates with each kitchen they design.

“Scavolini doesn’t tell its distributors to do what we do, but we love doing it because when a client is building their dream home, they ought to get a kitchen that’s unique to them. If we just kept doing the same thing over and over, it would be nothing but a job. We like a challenge.”

Nina Santamaria feels the same way. “This is a perfect example of the architect worked with an interior designer, worked with a supplier, worked with a furniture maker, and everyone did their part well. Kudos to the contractor who really followed all our plans well and built them well. I’ve been to the house three or four times since they moved in. The kitchen is where everyone eats unless the married kids and grandchildren are visiting. It’s their tambayan, It’s fresh, it’s bright, it’s cool, it’s welcoming. And the mom is so happy because it has a lot of storage.” •