honest house

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Win a copy of Real Home Ideas 5: Small Space Solutions from Manila's leading interior design blog, House of Onika. Learn more about the contest here.
This widely-read blog blog did this feature on my little humble space last February. House of Onika has also appeared in numerous local magazines.



If you own a condominium unit and have no idea how to make the most of it, join the contest and you may just win the small space decorating handbook.

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GETTING TO KNOW YOU (AGAIN)

I am having a love affair with my sofa. I love how its tall, wide arms hug me during lonely days when I lose myself reading a book.

My sofa is like an old lover whose nearness is familiar and comforting, except that it is mid-century Danish modern and I've never had a Danish lover.

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HONEST HOUSE

It's dizzying: Moneyed people who have chronic bad taste try to buy taste. This is not a good idea. The smarter few who employ interior decorators end up with impersonal "model units" that they don't look good in, and the dumber majority end up with ugly houses stuffed to the ceiling with ugly (but expensive) things.

I don't understand why they do this.

A home should be honest. If you use Italian tiles but you've never been to Italy, you are lying. You are also destroying the environment and the economy. Do you really have to fly flooring all the way from Italy when our own local tile industry is world-renowned? They use Philippine-made tiles in luxury French hotels and German airports!

I'm proud to say that in this white box I live in, nothing is contrived. Everything was from a place I've been to. Everything has a function and nothing is for display.

It's certainly not aspirational (a concept so parvenu it's embarrassing). Nothing here is expensive beyond replacement. Like I mentioned in an old post, i also an honest house in fiscal terms. It's low-maintenance and conducive to building wealth.

You can lose a house just as easily as you can lose a pen. That's the truth. So keep your emotions in check. Don't buy or decorate a house to project a life you want people to think you have. Be honest, and you'll start to make more tasteful choices.

all i want

So I came home to the tragedy of an almost empty box of French wines. I only have two bottles left from the last time I went wine shopping, which was in February this year. I got seven bottles then, which means I consume exactly ONE bottle every month.

I'm too sober.

Friends, if you are listening, all I want for my birthday and for Christmas are good bottles of French wine. The wines listed below all fall into the P700 to P1,000 category, which means you can all easily afford to give them to me because I know how much money you people make.

• Jurancon-Sec Lapeyre
• Coteaux de Languedoc - Mescladic
• Jurancon-Lapeyre Molleux

I need about seven bottles more to last me until February, when Sommelier Selection goes on sale again.

my madrid