Design interview

Tucked away in a most unlikely location is Kassa, designer Karen Santos’ most recent endeavour—one that adds an eclectic nuance to the modern home,

Kassa, Karen Santos’ latest endeavour, aims to add a touch of the eclectic and the imaginative to the modern Filipino home

The urban landscape has changed a great deal in barely a decade with many people deciding to move into the growing number of condominiums and apartments for the sake of convenience and comfort. But changing times also mean changing tastes which, in the case of most modern city dwellers, means that people want something more than the usual furniture and accents available in many department stores. This led to a lightbulb moment for designer Karen Santos.

“I thought that, with a lot of apartments and condos coming up, there really is a need for more things for the home,” she says. “What I decided to do was to bring a lot of brand new things [into the market]: accessories, tables, and others. But, at the same time, I thought about making a one-stop-shop where people can buy everything from brand new items, to vintage objects, and even antiques.”

That one-stop-shop is hidden away in an unlikely neighbourhood, a small jewel-box of a place in Pinagkaisahan, Makati, its façade sporting lush ivy and an intriguing selection of chairs in the windows. Its name—Kassa—can be read from the brown and gold awning over the entrance. It’s an appropriate name for a shop specialising in furniture and home accents, being a play on the Spanish word casa [house], but the way it is spelled is a bit of a throwback to another brand that begins with the capital K: Kashieca, the knitwear and apparel business that Santos founded and later sold to the Bench Group of Companies.

“When I sold Kashieca to Bench [in 2004], I started this natural stone flooring business,” Santos recalls with regard to where her foray into home furnishing began. “I’ve been doing that for 18 years now. Then, a couple of years ago, I started doing table linens, and a lot of people got to know about that. I did table linens because I wanted to go back to working with fabric, designing things, and doing embroidery.”

While natural stone flooring continues to be Santos’ primary line of business, this foray into home linens was a natural progression from it. She first promoted her line of home linens at several

There is a sense of playful modernity that imbues the overall aesthetic in the shop

pop-up bazaars. It was, at the time, the tip of an iceberg of ideas. When her own home went under renovation, Santos found herself looking for unique pieces of furniture—some of which were made in the 18th and 19th centuries—that could not be sourced or purchased locally. She decided to bring these pieces in herself, and ended up with a unique home accents store.

To describe Kassa is to say that it is like stepping into a treasure trove, one that is rather eclectic and features a tasteful array of furniture and objets d’art from various historical periods. Anyone entering the foyer will be greeted by a number of visually pleasing arrangements: gilded Louis XV sconces flanking the entrance are filled with coral branches and dried starfish; white majolica busts of Greek gods or Moorish kings gaze out from the shelves; clear crystal and dark porcelain obelisks stand beside glossy ceramic vases and candle-holders made to look like desert succulents and other plants; and there is a magnificent piece of Japanese embroidery dating back to the Meiji Era (1868-1912) with exquisite satinstitched chrysanthemums blooming upon a white silk surface. Instead of grouping her items by era, Santos has whimsically grouped them by colour, and the potential shopper progresses from the warm reds and pinks to the much cooler blues and greens at the other end of the shop.

Here, one finds fine examples of furniture from all three Napoleonic eras sharing the space with pieces from the reigns of Kings Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. The clean, modern lines of a Vittorio Dasi dining table from the ’50s provides a pleasant contrast to a more outré table mounted upon a pedestal that, on close inspection, proves to be made up of deer antlers. Likewise, a pair of mid-century phoenix-themed ebony console tables from a Milanese palazzo adds a striking note to the space, positioned as they are against plain white walls.

Yet there is nothing quaint or tweedy about Kassa, considering the amount of antique and vintage pieces it stocks. Indeed, there is a sense of playful modernity that imbues the overall aesthetic in the shop. Santos takes classic chairs and dresses them up in original modern fabrics with patterns that range from brilliant tropical, to bold geometrics, to colourful florals, and to whimsical ones with parrots or teapots.

“I think that while people like the look of these antique French chairs, they don’t want them to seem old or dated,” Santos says of the reupholstered pieces. “I’ve put some fun fabrics on them; and it gives them new life.”

With its mix of beautifully curated antique and vintage pieces juxtaposed with modern objects and accents, Kassa offers an extensive range that will add style and character to the contemporary Filipino home.