TREASURE TROVE

Ease and elegance are the hallmarks of the closets an entrepreneur is building to store entertaining staples

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Above Cristiana Fonseca plans her next tablescape in the party closet she created in her home. She is holding a tablecloth made using "Gloria's Pattern," a motif she created for her mother who loved peaches, flowers, and birds. Opposite Casual blue stemware delivers the sparkle of cut crystal with everyday glass. Butterfly napkin rings were hand-carved out of stones that are native to Brazil.

Cristiana Fonseca can’t recall the powder room in her childhood home. Nor is its living room particularly familiar. But memory does serve the closet where her mother kept the family’s table keepsakes: silver and china received as wedding gifts and all the special pieces that built gatherings in their native Goiânia, Brazil, into beauty.

Along with some of those heirlooms that were passed down to Cristiana, the affinity for collecting tablewares was shared too. Cristiana’s passion prompted her to launch Gloria Party Closet, a business that builds spaces designed specifically to house the accoutrements used to create table artistry.

“I have many memories of going into that space,” Cristiana says of the special closet in her childhood home. “I think about where these pieces came from and eventually the occasions where they were used.”

Cristiana now calls Boca Raton, Florida, home. It’s where she and her husband relocated from Brazil with their three sons in 2016 and where she designed her first closet.

Formerly a director of a securities company with 6,000 employees, entertaining was then merely Cristiana’s hobby. With the discovery of others who bear a tabletop enthusiasm as strong as hers, her closet business became not the result of her education but the result of the life she lives.