So what’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, except that we seem to be more concerned about what people see in our homes than the room we actually use when we try to take shelter from the chaos outside.
Master’s Bedroom, a home store that concentrates on beds and bedroom furniture, wants to push the bedroom into homeowners’ design consciousness.
The bedroom is not only where we sleep, after all. It’s where we really let our hair down, savor our solitude, spend quality time with our spouses, children and our television set.
"In every house, the hearth is the bedroom," says Joseph Morales, who owns Master’s Bedroom with his girlfriend Audrey Soledad, his brother Raffy Morales, and Raffy’s wife Yoriko. "The finest things you see should be in your master’s bedroom."
Joseph’s family also owns Citibeds and it was here where he got his feet wet in retail. He worked for the company for 12 years and learned everything about the bed business and eventually the bedroom business, too. As a third-generation member of the family, he learned what people wanted in their bedrooms. "Even when I was working at Citibeds, I wasn’t concerned just about the beds, but the atmosphere in the bedroom, how to make it look and feel more comfortable."
So when he and his partners decided to open Master’s Bedroom a year and a half ago, they agreed to source bed frames from everywhere – Africa, Belgium, Germany, Malaysia, and of course from Filipino manufacturers who export their products to the most sophisticated design houses abroad.
One of the prettiest beds in the store is a four-poster made of mahogany – it’s so heavy it took about 10 people to move it around the showroom. Joseph says that when it comes to trends in bed frames, the classics will always remain – "The four-poster with a canopy is such a romantic, timeless design. It’s going to be around forever." Of the more contemporary trends, the fastest moving are the cubist bed frames, those without much ornamentation or detailing, but are dramatic in their minimalist lines just the same.
"We really can’t move to new trends until customers are ordering the same things," says Raffy Morales, who was formerly with the US Navy and posted in Okinawa, Japan, where he met his wife.
Apart from bed frames, Master’s Bedroom also has select furniture pieces for the living room and accessories. Many of the pieces are designed by the Morales brothers while the others are by long-time furniture manufacturers. The choices are varied – you have the traditional and contemporary lines, covered in fabric or leather or are in wicker. What’s nice about the pieces is that they are in different sizes. You can easily picture them in your home, whether you’re living in a cramped condominium or a palatial house.
While the store caters to the upper market (bed frames with beds go from P57,000 to P100,000 plus), they also have gift items that range from dried topiary to very cool-again lava lamps to small items that start at P50.
The piece de resistance among the chairs is the Osram massage chair from the United States. It’s a show-stopping, mother-of-all-massage chairs priced at P235,000. Easily the most expensive item in the store, the massage chair has 10 massage balls, five times more acupressure points than regular two-ball chairs. Raffy laughs and says, "It costs as much as a good second-hand car, but it’s worth every cent."
Joseph pipes in, "One time I tried it and in no time at all I was asleep in the chair."
So when they told us to try it and see if it does the job well – we’re a little jaded with massage chairs that do nothing but give you a headache with their vibration – we were very surprised. The balls inside the chairs knead your back like a masseuse’s knuckles. You can program the chair to concentrate on your upper back or lower back while it is simultaneously working on your legs. The leg part has an airbag that compresses to put pressure on your legs. The chair also has a three-speed adjustment that can knead or tap or roll. In fact, sitting in it is like getting a professional shiatsu massage. Now we know where the price went – in the technology that makes it work so well.
Raffy answers our unspoken question by saying, "You’ll be surprised, we’ve sold quite a few pieces to our customers."
In today’s environment where stress is driving everybody to re-do their home and make it their sanctuary, it’s high time we paid attention to the most intimate room in our homes.