Class menagerie

The Tailored Home makes the most of this maximalist moment in home design by housing a well-mannered menagerie.

When we first heard about The Tailored Home — a most unusual home design store in Greenwich — we thought we had missed our moment. This belonged in our March “Visionary Designs” issue, not our April animal issue, we thought.

Were we ever wrong. Perched atop Greenwich Avenue opposite Pickwick Plaza, The Tailored Home makes the most of this maximalist moment in home design by housing a bewitching menagerie amid chinoiserie wallpapers; voluptuous furnishings in jewel colors; and white teapots, Asian soup bowls, pillows and pumpkin-shaped ottomans (“erottomans,” as co-owner Scott Falciglia calls them) with sensual black-line drawings of swimming or copulating nudes that recall Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Against this riotous backdrop, seated monkeys support steel candelabra. A headless dog in ceramic cream becomes a stand for a matching watering can. A seated canine in an Egyptian-style headdress offers a votive. Flamingos stalk off plates or swim across rectangular pillows shaped like butterflies. The 12 animals that make up the Chinese zodiac stand at attention in groups that suggest chess sets. Golden cows roller skate, balancing votives. Horses carrying Byzantine-like figures fly across one print while dragons face off on another.

Why all the animals, apart from the idea that the three-floor shop is quirky and wildly creative?

“We think they’re joyous,” says Falciglia, who owns the 2-year-old store with Jhon (pronounced John) Ortiz, along with a 5-year-old Tailored Home in Westport and a studio workshop in Norwalk that crafts furniture and window treatments. It’s all part of a business that offers a full range of interior design services.

The pair are partners in life as well, complementary and yet similar, with overlapping talents and interests. 

“I was in textiles and retail and got into the idea of building furniture,” says Ortiz, who was born in Venezuela, raised in Colombia and came to this area via Florida. “So I started to take design classes and studied in Paris, Milan and Fairfield University.”

“I’m from New Fairfield,” Falciglia says, “and attended Fairfield University, where I studied international business, and worked in finance for 12 years.”

About 8 years ago, Falciglia met Ortiz, who was living in Norwalk. The two moved in together and soon found their basement had become a furniture workshop. (Today they live in Westport with their Yellow Labrador Retriever Spanky and Persian cat Baby.) The couple incorporated their business in 2014.

While it would seem that Ortiz does all the design — as per The Tailored Home website, which says “Interior design by Jhon Ortiz” — and Falciglia handles the business end, the two share the yin-yang of interior design. Falciglia says Ortiz has a good business brain, while he contributes his aesthetic sense and helps with design.

The two have a team of about a dozen who craft the furnishings in Norwalk, adhering, they say, to the highest standards in craftsmanship and materials. “Only high-end furniture is being made in the U.S.,” Ortiz notes. And they are part of that trend. “We use real glue, dowels and joints,” Falciglia adds.

They also repair and reupholster furniture, while accessories are sourced from vendors they find in Paris and Milan — as well as closer to home. The Tailored Home carries candles from sister-in-law Natalia Falciglia’s Poured Love company in Brooklyn, which has such arresting scents as Leather and Sweet Bourbon.

The pair’s aesthetic dovetails with a moment in which color, texture, pattern and stuff are back in interior design. Falciglia sees this as a reaction to a momentous time in world history.

“People are trying to shake up what we’re going through in civilization,” he says.

The Tailored Home is doing just that.

For more, visit thetailoredhomect.com.

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