A warm and hospitable home

Giulia Tarantello Pnematicatos is a young and passionate interior designer from Cape Town, South Africa. After training for two years at Design Time, the city’s top interior design school founded in 1987 in the Observatory suburb, she worked for several design houses such as A+I design, Colonial House Design and most recently The Italcotto Design Centre, South Africa’s largest importer and distributor of the major Italian ceramic tile brands. It was here, in their offices and showroom, that she first got to know Italian tile and fell in love with its aesthetic, technological and functional qualities.
„During that period I had the opportunity to explore new areas of design,“ says Giulia, who recently opened the firm GP Design. With her customary enthusiasm, she started out with a series of small-scale projects including a bathroom transformation, a small apartment and a „man cave“, a common feature in single-family Cape Town homes. This is a small secluded space such as a converted garage where the man of the house can relax, often with sofa and armchairs, bar or billiards, television or DIY tools.
Casa Tarantello marked a major step forward for GP Design in terms of scale and creativity. „The client gave me an empty shell, an open-plan contemporary kitchen, living and dining area. It was an incredible adventure to be able to apply my knowledge of interior design and decoration to create the house of their dreams.“
The project incorporated a soft, elegant palette of neutral tones – the natural wood table, the sand coloured sofa, the white chairs, the taupe and light green blocks of colour on white walls, the transparency of the glass surfaces – punctuated by small coloured accents.
Given the designer’s background, it was hardly a surprise that she decided to use ceramic tile supplied by Italcotto for the floor, opting for Legend porcelain tiles produced by Ariana (ABK group).
Her choice of the pale wood (sand colour) version in a finish reproducing the veins, knots, contrasting material effects and chiaroscuro patterns and a 20 x 120 cm size clearly demonstrates her detailed knowledge of the material and its aesthetic, technological and functional qualities.