Loud and clear among the chit chat at Robb & Stucky’s grand opening, one distinctive laugh could be heard above the rest.
It belonged to Thom Filicia, celebrity interior designer and founder of Thom Filicia, Inc., his design firm. As part of its grand opening speaker series, Robb & Stucky featured Filicia’s Home Collection for Vanguard Furniture and invited him to its dazzling new showroom in Boca Raton, where Filicia shared his thoughts on everything from trends for the new year to his favorite sound (it’s the “pop!” of a Champagne bottle).
Filicia is a proponent of designing your interior based on your personality and lifestyle. He sees this move toward more personal designs, which takes into account a person’s interests and habits, as a prominent upcoming trend.
“It’s very important to look inward, look at who you are in your life—and the way you live, and the way you entertain —and develop your space really based on that,” Filicia says.
He says it’s about creating a space that’s functional for you, not necessarily what you think the function of the room is. For example, if you entertain and cook a lot, perhaps you can use the larger area of a living room as a dining room. It’s all about fitting a room to an individual.
That doesn’t mean that if you like pink, everything should be pink. Filicia also shared his approach to design, which is all about balance. “I always find that you don’t want to put a lot of very clean, modern pieces into a clean, modern space,” he says. He likes to mix raw with refined materials, an urban space with more sophisticated pieces, and clean interiors with more organic fabrics and shapes.
One of the more enlightening things we learned: if he wasn’t an interior designer, Filicia would be a ski instructor by day and a Ketel One ambassador by night. Really, he only chose interior design because there is no college degree for a skiing Ketel One rep.
When he admitted this, he laughed and laughed, and so did we.
Did you miss Thom Filicia’s Q&A at Robb & Stucky? Don’t fret—Robb & Stucky is getting personal with Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams at their Boca Raton showroom on Feb. 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. Visit robbstuckyintl.com to learn more.
All photos by Miss Takes, Miranda Kruse. Video by David Shuff.
This post is sponsored by Robb & Stucky.
 visited Boca Raton's new Robb & Stucky showroom as part of its grand opening speaker series.){kind=link}