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FeaturesOctober 20, 2002

Varkonyi Schaub ~ South Florida Sun-Sentinel The year is 1979. The location: Sao Paulo, Brazil. A precocious 9-year-old girl goes to work with her widowed mother at an interior design studio. The girl, drawn to the drafting room, amuses herself by drawing her own sketches of the projects...

Charlyne

Varkonyi Schaub ~ South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The year is 1979. The location: Sao Paulo, Brazil. A precocious 9-year-old girl goes to work with her widowed mother at an interior design studio. The girl, drawn to the drafting room, amuses herself by drawing her own sketches of the projects.

Fast forward to 2002. That girl has matured into 32-year-old Celia Cabral Domenech, a Coral Gables, Fla., interior decorator with an architect's training, who has just been named one of House Beautiful's "Rising Stars of Design."

Never heard of her? You're not alone. Domenech and the others are on the cusp of being discovered. Their names aren't splashed in every magazine or designer showhouse. They don't have furniture lines or sheets or towels bearing their names. At least not yet.

So what makes this designer a member of this elite group?

"Celia combined a wonderful Latin heritage with an American can-do attitude," said Carolyn Sollis, executive editor of House Beautiful. "She had a strong presentation with a little bit of local color, and at the same time has a strong American point of view. She also has a fantastic background and has understanding of history. She likes to look back as well as forward. She understands the past, but she's not stuck in it."

To compile the list, Sollis and her staff scoured the country for young, unheralded talent. They were looking for candidates who were running a design business that was not more than 5 years old, never had their work published and were age 40 or younger. The winning 15 were selected from 50 finalists who submitted several projects for review.

"These are the people that we thought were going to be the next players, people no one had heard of and people we thought would be the next rising stars," Sollis said of the list she hopes will become an annual tradition. "We would help put them on the map."

Besides being profiled in the magazine's October issue, the winners participated in an exhibition and panel discussion of their work at Sotheby's earlier this month in New York City.

We met with Domenech to talk about her life and design. This dark-haired beauty could be a model as well as a designer. She has the kind of cheekbones a camera loves and wears a dress size in the single digits. Her clothing choice is as clean and simple as her decorating style -- white cotton slacks and long duster top. The only color comes from her beige heels and Louis Vuitton briefcase.

Here's her take on life and design:

Q. How did you react when you learned the news from House Beautiful?

A. It took me a week to believe it was true. I never gave much attention to being published. The first couple of jobs, I didn't bother to get any photos taken.

Q. Ironically, your husband is a well-known architectural photographer. How did you meet?

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A. I hired Carlos to do a photo shoot. We both fell in love. We began dating a month later, and were married a year later. I called Carlos to do a job and ended up hiring him for my life.

Q. What training did you have in Brazil?

A. My mother always said I needed to have a degree. She said I needed something stronger than being a decorator. When I was 17, I went to the university to get a degree in architecture and urbanism. At the same time, from ages 17-22, I worked with the designer Anna Maria Vieiri Santos.

Q. Why aren't you practicing architecture here?

A. I would have to go back to school for a year and one half in order to practice and I thought I would open a design firm instead.

Q. How long have you been here?

A. I left Brazil in 1988 for Miami, although I still have an office there. My company is Living Interior Design. I rent space here in the office of architect Jorge L. Hernandez. I didn't think it was necessary to have my own big office because I meet with clients in their homes most of the time.

Q. Do you have any heroes in architecture?

A. Richard Meier. (Meier is known for ignoring the fashion trends of architecture and following his own design philosophy. His works include the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany and a residential building under construction on the Hudson River in New York's West Village.)

Q. Any designers who are heroes?

A. My favorites are the French designer Christian Liaigre, who has furniture in the Holly Hunt showroom in the Miami Design District, and Antonio Citterio, an Italian who designs for B&B Italia.

Q. You told House Beautiful that you also liked David Hicks. Why?

A. He was not afraid to use different patterns and colors. He had his own style. I like the way he had his own personality and was not afraid to show it. He knew what was good and not good and he worked well with color and fabric. (House Beautiful once compared Hicks, who died in 1998, to "nothing less than a full-time control freak with a perfect pitch for taste and style.")

Q. What is your personal design style?

A. I like modern pieces mixed with antiques, ethnic pieces and natural fibers like linen, cotton, leather and sisal. Modern needs perfect proportion. If so, it speaks for itself. My style is casual chic. ... I like a clean look with no clutter. But I use lots of paintings. I also like black-and-white photography; it's very chic and goes with everything.

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