Beyond beautiful, beyond Asia

It’s like going around Asia in-side the store. Except it’s not Asian Asian. It’s Asian in tradition rather than overall look. The store has contemporary ceramic and stoneware pieces from Thailand, beautiful lacquers from Cambodia, carabao bone from China, stone sculptures from the Philippines, and the show-stopping vintage wallpaper from Australia’s Florence Broadhurst.

These pieces can be in a space that’s severely modern to add warmth, as well as in a house that’s as Asian as the traditional roof finials of Bali.

The name says it all: Beyond Bamboo, a store owned by sisters Sheila Romero, who at one point in her life was a very spirited restaurateur, and interior designer Trisha Bermudez.

Beyond Bamboo or BB offers accessories from Asia and a smattering of pieces from Europe, and furniture pieces that range from original designs to copies of mid-century classics.

The price points run the gamut of below a thousand for a pillar candle to P46,500 for an aircon cabinet. There are pieces for gifts (in fact, brides today often include BB in their registry) such as bedsheets, leather containers, vases, room sprays from Provence, and luscious throws and pillows covered in faux fur. For the more ambitious gift giver — ooh, how lovely for the receiver! — there are one-of-kind pieces such as lamps, giant vases (and we do mean giant), stone sculptures by J. Calma, an architect-slash-artist, and potter Addie Mendoza, and rich fabrics for upholstery or as wall cover.

BB also exclusively distributes wallpaper by Florence Broadhurst, an Australian gal who lived the jazz age in the 1920s in true style, having lived in Sydney, Queensland, Shanghai, London, and having been a performer, concert organizer, and a trend-setting designer who shunned convention and combined colors — fuchsia pinks, lemon yellows, lime greens, vivid oranges, turquoise, blacks, metallic silvers and gold — that reflected her flamboyant personality.

Admittedly, the wallpaper (a favorite of Wallpaper and Elle Décor editors) is pricey at around P18,000 per roll, but as Sheila points out, wallpaper today need not cover entire walls. She herself has covered only her powder room ceiling with Broadhurst wallpaper. And with wallpaper making a comeback this year, a trick that stylists like to do is to do it in just one panel. (Anyway, the wallpaper is peelable and washable, so transferring it wouldn’t be so impossible.)

Sheila has the same attitude with other richly textured fabrics: You don’t cover your entire sofa set with it, rather, you do it as an accent like on the seat of an armchair or its back. The same thing with the synthetic fur throws and pillows from UK — ooh, so soft to the touch and to lie on with their goosedown filling — scatter them over your bed and living room and you get an instant feel of opulence.

"We work with whatever budget the client has," she says, adding that the store offers a 10 percent discount off the tag price. "Clients can bring their own fabrics or designs and we make it for them."

Beyond Bamboo changes its accessory collections every two months. Many items are on sale now as they still belong to the December line. "Late last year it was black and white, previous to that were prints. We try to come up with a different collection quarterly. Now we’re back to earth colors but with a lot of prints for accent."

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Beyond Bamboo is located at 122 Jupiter St., Bel-Air Village, Makati. Call 890-8191, 0906-2332353, fax 890-7680.