After shutting its doors in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Queen Street West or QSW, the ready-to-wear and lifestyle boutique in San Juan, recently reopened for business. Apart from following standard protocols such as temperature checks, limiting the number of people inside the shop, thorough disinfection of garments and a more robust delivery system, QSW is also introducing a new range of PPE-inspired jackets to go with the times.
By Alex Y. Vergara
Photos by Mark Chester Ang
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story, originally titled “Queen Street West: Method in the Madness,” first appeared early last year on Enclaves, PeopleAsia’s home and interior design magazine.
If it were up to him, fashion designer Noel Crisostomo would have gone for more modern and streamlined interiors with a few quirky details here and there for Queen Street West, a lifestyle store he and husband Roland Alzate (the two were married in Canada a few years ago) have put up and opened early this year in San Juan. Their new place of business is an expanded version of the same shop they used to run in Makati.
Chinoiserie, Queen Street West’s look is certainly not! Instead, Noel Crisostomo (BELOW) calls husband Roland Alzate’s play on prints, furniture and accent pieces, and East- meets-West aesthetics as “French Oriental”
Instead of calling the shots like he did in the past, Noel ceded a huge chunk of the interiors’ design process to Roland, also a fashion designer, who was out on a buying trip in Hong Kong during this interview. Apart from helping him edit the pieces, Noel was simply content, thanks to his background in architecture, to focus more on the spaces’ construction and finishing, including necessary, but seemingly unglamorous details like attending to the shop’s walls, ceilings and sliding doors.
“Our style sensibilities are very different,” Noel shares with a chuckle. “Meeting halfway was out of the question. We’d probably end up disagreeing at every turn. To keep the peace, I simply let Roland do his thing. To be fair to him, he constantly consulted me and was quite open to my suggestions during the design process.”
As a lifestyle store (ABOVE), Queen Street West sells RTW dresses and separates and new and pre-owned furniture and accent
pieces from China, Japan and France, among other places. Sakura pink and calamansi walls (BELOW) add to the visual feast of featured items, prints and texture
While the old Queen Street West, and Noel’s previous shops before that, teemed with minimalist touches, including black and white walls, unobtrusive furniture pieces and strategic lighting, this latest reincarnation is anything but sparse, as it celebrates such design flourishes as animal and floral prints splashed on throw pillows and upholstered furniture pieces—from a pair of sofas in the main sitting area to a chaise lounge in the spacious fitting room at the back, as well as walls done in such delicious colors as “calamansi,” sakura pink and a pale shade of sky blue.
French Oriental
Shabby chic or even bohemian rhapsody, Queen Street West’s look is certainly not. Noel simply calls it “French Oriental,” the result of Roland’s fascination with Western Europe, especially Paris, which the couple was fortunate enough to visit several times together during a less busy phase in their lives.
(TOP) Carved camphor chests; (BELOW0 And a den of faux tigers and cheetahs in the form of gurines with an eye- catching mural as their backdrop
“It’s different from the chinoiserie I grew up with in Manila during the ’80s,” Noel adds. “That look was confined to mostly Chinese antiques, lamps and giant folding fans galore.”
Although Queen Street West also has its share of wall accents inspired by the classic Chinese fan, they’re limited to a mirror in the second sitting area and a rather huge hanging décor made of hand-painted wood embellished with jade and various decorative stones in the fitting room. At the same time, it also features several intricate tables that look more European than anything else.
“That table with lovely floral embellishments, for instance, in the main sitting area is actually from Italy, while this smaller one here, I believe, is originally from France,” he says. “You normally don’t mix such pieces in a purely Orientalia-inspired arrangement.”
(TOP) The tting room, with its chaise lounge and cabinet, has become a virtual boudoir; (BELOW) Stuffed toy tiger guards Chinese altar table featuring rare Lladro pieces
The painted walls, together with several Persian rugs sourced mainly from China and Iran, act as imaginary dividers that demarcate each of the store’s section and subsection: calamansi walls for the entrance and main sitting area, and sakura pink walls at the center and all the way to the back, which leads to a second sitting area.
Meanwhile, the lone wall painted in sky blue acts as a backdrop to a vivid mural depicting a lush jungle that’s home to a pride of painted tigers and cheetahs. Going by his more-is-more school of thinking, Roland doubled the number of virtual big cats by lumping together several tiger and cheetah figurines in various sizes by the mural. A bigger faux tiger, a pre-owned stuffed toy Roland bought from a friend, “guards” a more secluded area of the shop.
Den of tigers
Roland bought the tiger for their two-year-old son Bucco to play with. Since the boy is more drawn to other toys, le tigre ended up vying for customers’ attention instead, as part of Queen Street West’s ever-growing list of décor. Its size and vivid coloration alone instantly add a touch of whimsy to the area.
Acting as an ideal foil that effectively tempers whatever cloying effects such pretty hues on the walls leave are certain sections painted in strips of black and white. A good number of furniture pieces came from the collection of Roland’s grandmother. He later had the classic chairs and sofas refurbished, their seats and backrests reupholstered in various printed Italian fabrics bought from Hong Kong.
“The general idea, as Roland envisioned it, is to provide clients with a series of intimate venues where they could congregate and engage in chicahan (idle talk) while fitting clothes or looking for certain items to buy,” says Noel. “The shop’s lived-in feel adds to its charm, while making people feel more at home.”
It’s not uncommon, for instance, for an older client to lie down and relax on the chaise lounge in the fitting area, while her daughter or daughter-in-law fits a dress or gown. That’s perfectly fine for the designing duo since, as they say, “that’s the idea.” The shop’s fashion component sells mostly ready-to-wear dresses and separates, but the pair is also open to doing made-to-measure pieces for women with special requirements.
Beyond fashion
Apart from fashion items, the two have also added new and pre-owned furniture and accent pieces as well as gift items from Europe and Asia, including France, Japan and China, into the mix. Among the store’s more noteworthy pieces are blue-and-white stools and jars, lacquer-and-gold painted wall dividers, and intricately carved, mother of pearl-inlaid cabinets and camphor chests from China, vases from Vietnam and Japan, and porcelain and crystal pieces mostly from France.
“Some are antiques,” says Noel, “but I’m not sure how old they are or where exactly they came from. It’s Roland who sources most of the pieces. Almost everything is for sale, including a few porcelain pieces from Capodimonte, House of Erte and Lenox. While they’re here, some of these furniture pieces double as cabinets where we temporarily store fabrics and clothes.”
There’s plenty of such pieces where they came from. As soon as, say, a cabinet is sold, Roland simply replaces it with another similar piece parked in their Quezon City home.
“Oh, our home is on the verge of becoming a virtual warehouse,” says Noel in mock horror. “We’re running out of space because it has become our secondary storage for these huge pieces.”
Those who know Noel well would never mistake the place as his. But he couldn’t be happier and more surprised with the results, as Roland didn’t formally train as an interior designer. He simply relied on his instincts and the countless hours the couple spent watching snippets of various design shows on YouTube, giving them virtual tours of other creative people’s interesting homes.
“I don’t think the look has anything to do with Alessandro Michelle either,” says Noel, when asked if they were influenced by Gucci’s celebrated creative director who almost singlehandedly made play on texture and the print-on-print look cool and mainstream. “What you see is the result of Roland’s vision. He didn’t care about rules. This is pretty much a reflection of him, and that extends to his fashion—eye-catching but done in a tasteful way.”
The shop’s piece de resistance is still Roland’s large Chinese wooden altar at the back, which he refurbished to its former glory and later repurposed as a dollhouse of sorts for his collection of Japanese geisha figurines (no longer in production) from Lladro. As some cynics are wont to say, everything in this world has its price, but perhaps not this antique statement altar and its rare and fragile contents. They remain, as of this moment, the personal property of Queen Street West’s worldly and wise owners.
Queen Street West lifestyle store is located 194 A. Mabini St., Baron 3 Gardens, San Juan
Call 0915-1766440
