posh+design

Posh+Design

One of the first words I learned in Dominican slang was “cariñito”, which is a personalized item, generally small in size, which one gives as a gift to a friend or family member. Up until little more than a year ago, I had declared myself a failure in the battle to find exquisite cariñitos, manufactured with humour and contemporary design here in Santo Domingo.
And then Posh+Design opened.
The brainchild of Marcos Malespín and Helen Borda, Posh+Design promotes the idea that, from one generation to the next, elegance changes and it has now absorbed the sense of irony and globalized tastes of today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. “The parents of the Posh+Design customer go for a Christofle dinner set; our customer goes for a set of ornate cutlery... made out of plastic,” Malespín says.
Dichotomic objects such as this cutlery set are complemented by a gun-shaped flower vase, or a skate-shaped bookend; by tiny pieces from designer Jonathan Adler or by a seemingly antique set of bottles whose telltale sign of true age is the smiling skull etched in the glass. And all of this is combined with apparently unrelated pieces, such as artisan handmade soap or baby socks. But it works, because the common denominator for all of these pieces – most imported from the United States – is that, no mater what their genre, they’ve been selected through Malespín and Borda’s great taste.
Every time I go to the store I spend several minutes trying to choose an object, and the rest of the customers I’ve seen go through the same thing.
Posh+Design is located at the corner of Virgilio Díaz Ordoñez and David Masalles streets, on the first floor of Plaza Masalles (Julieta, Santo Domingo) | 809 5442560 & 809 6218316.