Manuel Canovas Home

With a showroom, studio and custom workroom in Westport, Connecticut, Venezuelan-born furniture designer Jhon Ortiz’s custom furniture company The Tailored Home offers brightly colored handmade furnishings that span a range of styles. 

Ortiz cofounded The Tailored Home with his life and business partner, Scott Falciglia. A veteran of the textile industry and retail, Oritz took design classes in Paris, Milan and at Fairfield University in Connecticut. At the latter, Falciglia focused on international business and met Ortiz around 2012 after a 12-year-long career in finance. Combining their talents, the pair moved in together and the foundation of The Tailored Home took shape in their basement workshop in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2014. Despite working in areas of the business that call on their distinctive skill sets, the pair share responsibilities, endeavoring to create a company as dynamic and adaptable as their design philosophy. 

As more people shift into roles across multiple careers over their lifetime, they too are uprooted and are required to make changes to their spaces as they adapt to new surroundings. The Tailored Room is all about choosing what speaks to you in your new moment, whether that is a custom-made ottoman, crafted by local artisans in Westport or Norwalk, or a console table right off the brand’s showroom floor. 

While Ortiz designs and builds furnishings in the mid-century modern style — sofas with organic curves and sleek, low-profile tables that are ideal for your conversation pit — the brand also revisits antique and vintage furniture, in the spirit of upcycling, reviving secondhand case pieces with provocative finishes and covering-over discarded seating with dazzling new fabrics. To the firm’s founders, change does not mean being impulsive — it’s instead something you intentionally seek out, embrace and experience every so often to cultivate growth. 

Featured in magazines and other media, The Tailored Home continues to support those who welcome change and appreciate quality furniture. 

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Jhon Ortiz seating, tables and other furniture.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.