fusion of fashion & design
Camille Villar collaborates with Cynthia Almario and Ivy Almario for the interiors of two luxury houses, drawing inspiration from fashion.
When Brittany chief operating officer Camille Villar was going to a planning meeting with her company’s architects and engineers for two new model units they were going to build in the luxury subdivision Portofino, she asked designing sisters Cynthia and Ivy Almario to join the meeting because the guys didn’t understand what she was talking about. They didn’t understand, for instance, what she meant when she’d say something like “I want a Tory Burch room,” or “I want this space to look like Christian Dior,” or “Can we have Missoni elements in this coffee table?”
If she had dropped names like Richard Meier or Karim Rasheed, the architects would definitely understand the kind of pegs she was referring to …. but fashion designers? What is a Tory Burch room? Who is Tory Burch?
The two houses that the three women collaborated on — Camille signing the checks and being hands-on every step of the design process; Ivy and Cynthia going to town with bold colors and luxury accents — are the Almarios’ 19th and 20th model houses for Brittany, the luxury subsidiary of giant developer Vista Land , and Camille’s first with them.
Called Alessandro (P20 million) and Renoir (P23 million), the model houses are located in a 300-hectare Italian-inspired community, and are two-story homes with 260 sq.m. and 323 sq.m. of floor space, respectively.
“Ever since I was young, my dad (Manny Villar) would take me around with him. He instilled in us a passion for real estate; we don’t see it as work,” says Camille, who began working for Brit- tany in the marketing department a year and a half ago was appointed chief operating officer. “I love the people I work with, I have a great team. I still feel sometimes overwhelmed by the things I have to learn still and I want to keep at it. What I love now is that I get to plan the subdivisions and get to see the houses as they are built.
Doing the model houses is my favorite part of the job.”
The four-bedroom Alessandro’s interiors were inspired by Camille herself. She told Cynthia and Ivy: “Think of me as your client when designing this house.”
Cynthia says, “It’s for a younger market. Camille is not a frou-frou girl, nothing sweet for her. She’s very tailored and sophisticated. She’s very edgy. She’s well travelled. When I think about her, I think about that certain young group, that like to recreate the hotel room they stayed at in, say, London.”
Indeed, the colors, textures and the lines are very hip, contemporary, and fashionable.
The whole design actually started from a fabric they found, a brown-and- white fabric that eventually became the house’s DNA. “We asked her, ‘Can we paint the house brown? Not just one room, but the entire interiors.’ She said, ‘Yes, go for it!’ Other people would have said brown is too dark and it will make the house look smaller.”
The color is actually Hershey’s chocolate brown. They literally gave the house painter Hershey’s chocolates and told him to copy the color.
The brown palette is punctuated with white and it works beautifully. “White makes everything look crisp against chocolate brown. It works because it’s extreme contrast, white and dark, it’s a very graphic combination. White makes everything sharper and it pops out,” says Ivy.
The Almarios, whose atelier has expanded into designing resorts (the Astoria Group), hotels, and restaurants, imagine a story behind every room and design around it. With Alessandro and Renoir, they had a great canvas to play on.
Alessandro’s layout on the ground floor is open, except for the den that can be converted into a guestroom. The living room flows into the dining room, then to the breakfast nook and
kitchen. While not excessively big, the space can actually accommodate a dinner for 20 people. Camille credits this to Vista Land architects and engineers’ mastery of maximizing space “because, after all, our portfolio includes small houses for under P1 million to big ones over P40 million.”
The designers put shelves on the wall that serve both as a focal point and a practical storage solution. They went for white and solid-color accessories from Shelter.
On the second floor, the stories are woven for a young family — a pink nursery, a red boy’s room with vintage accessories (a mobile of an airplane was hand-carried by Cynthia from the US), a green guestroom, and a gray master’s bedroom with hand-painted mural.
On top of the stairs, which people normally make as a second living room, which is eventually rarely used, the Almarios put a gift-wrapping, and arts and crafts station for the mom. They imagined this space for a woman who likes to wrap gifts for friends, equipping the station with lots of storage spaces for her materials and spools for her giftwrapping papers and ribbons.
There is always richness in the houses that Cynthia and Ivy Almario design. A touch of luxury, a big dose of warmth, a completeness of look, whether they are doing a modern Asian house or a contemporary western one.
For the Renoir model house, luxury is
emphasized. If Alessandro is for Camille as a homebuyer, Renoir was designed with her dad, Senator Manny Villar, in mind, a man who has made it and would now like to enjoy his success and wealth, thank you.
Renoir has an inner courtyard and a bonus room that is detached from the main house. This can be turned into a guestroom — “For the mother-in-law, my dad likes to joke,” says Camille with a laugh — or a home office and library.
In Renoir, the finishes are more premium like engineered hardwood for flooring. The designers chose more classic colors for the ground floor — champagne, beige, and other earth tones — but kept their colorful palette for the second floor.
Renoir has three bedrooms and a large family hall. Ivy and Cynthia decided to convert the family hall into an anteroom to the master ’ s bedroom. These two spaces were inspired by Ralph Lauren Home’s distinct colors of blue and white. The bathroom is spacious with a separate shower stall and a generous walk- in closet. The second bedroom features a gray tufted headboard and embroidered linens. Both bedrooms have hand-painted murals.
They converted the third bedroom into a den and painted the walls black. Again, they looked at Camille for inspiration for this room. They imagined a young, welltravelled photographer who loves Paris. On the walls are black and white photos of Parisian scenes that the photographer would have taken (in reality, Cynthia shot most of these while the others were simply from calendars).
Camille says, “I always look from the perspective of buyers when we’re building houses because people save up their whole lives to buy this, so I don’t want to disappoint them. It’s the same principle, whether it’s in Camella or Brittany, it should be the dream house that they want.”
Camille, who juggles the roles of real estate COO and TV host ( with Willie Revil- lame on TV5’ s ) , says she’s learning a lot from both jobs. “I get really uncomfortable when people say I have a ‘ showbiz career,’ it’s just a hosting job. The show is one way to help people without having to run for office and you don’t have to go through the stress of politics.”
And how is it working for her dad, a man who has built 250,000 houses in 37 years? “My dad is a difficult boss, he’s a demanding boss, only because he works 24/7 and he expects the same passion from you, but he is also a very inspiring boss. Just being around him makes you want to do better and he’s very supportive of everything I do.”
And which Villar is more demanding? Cynthia says, “They’re both great to work with. Cam’s fun to work with and also because she’s young she challenges you, you can’t use your easy design-go-to’s. But she was also fearless in giving us free rein.”
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