ECLECTIC DREAMS

Blending diverse styles and family preferences, tastemaker Tania Fricke creates a unified yet uniquely personal sanctuary across two apartments

- By Maritess Garcia Reyes. Photography by Jinggo Montenejo

When lifestyle consultant Tania Fricke first spoke with the owners of this home in Makati, the direction was starkly clear: to put together a two-unit apartment coherently without losing the individuality of the spaces and of the family members that would ultimately call this their primary home. “They asked me if I can put together all the [many different] things they want. I said, ‘Why not?’” Fricke shares, diving headfirst into the project and ecstatic to be simultaneously given such an opportunity and a challenge.

As one of the owners said, her family is a total mishmash. “We embrace our halo-haloness completely!” she says. The matriarch of the home is a seasoned dermatologist and a clinical researcher who has authored hundreds of published works in several medical journals. “Imagine the amount of books she has,” says Fricke.

The matriarch has two daughters, one of whom has followed in her Footsteps and become a doctor, while the other helms their skincare and cosmetics business. The two doctors stay in one of the units, “the more formal one”, as Fricke describes. On the other hand, the older daughter, with her sports-loving Argentinian husband and two children, occupies the other side. “The other unit is very Nantucket-inspired,” says the interior decorator. Fricke’s job then was to ensure that no matter which unit they are in, it should still feel like one united family is living in it. “That was the challenging part,” Fricke says.

To do this, Fricke turned common spaces into venues for the things they enjoy as a family. “There’s a constant stream of activities like communal weekly asados, pizza-making, cocktail-mocktail-dance sessions, regular movie nights, puzzling, trainer workouts now done over Zoom and long, meandering convos over dinner,” one of the daughters chimes in. With this, the family requested to create different nooks for such activities, peppered strategically around the flat.