Bridge For Design November Issue 2015 November 2015 | Page 112

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: In the guest bedroom, a chaise longue by Casamidy is juxtaposed with a 1950’s
standard lamp and a photograph by Amber Eagle. A Casamidy designed sofa covered in satin cushions
runs the length of one wall in the living room beneath a carved French mirror. The twin bedroom where
the boys sleep is decorated with suitably masculine accessories

In 2009, the work was almost finished and the air-plane tickets to
Brussels were purchased, but two weeks before the move, disaster
struck. On a family vacation near Cancun, Midy was swimming in
the ocean when she felt a blow to her neck. A barracuda had grazed
her throat, slicing the muscles in her neck, as well as her external
jugular, and almost piercing her aorta. She needed 62 stitches and
spent three weeks in the hospital. “The doctors say it is a miracle I’m
alive,” she says. It took a year until she was finally well enough to move
to Belgium with her family.
Today, in their serene townhouse, it’s hard to imagine the serious
calamity that she and her family endured. Midy, who loves to cook,
bustles around her new modern kitchen, with its steam oven and
striking yellow backsplash. The boys, chase each other around the
main floor’s spacious parlours, which are made luminous by their palegrey walls, decorative plasterwork, and bleached oak-plank floors.
On the ground floor of the townhouse they have opened a Casamidy
showroom.
On the floors above, the palette deepens: the guest bedroom is brown
and olive, the boys’ room is blue, and the master bedroom – with its
112 Bridge for Design November 2015

iron canopy bed – is a soft grey. Most dramatic of all is the tone-ontone purple library, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and co-ordinating
walls and furnishings (even the foreman had to admit that the end
result looked great).
On one of their first mornings in Brussels, Almada heard a familiar
noise and noticed a flash of fluorescent green outside his window. “It’s
a flock of parrots,” he told Midy, who didn’t believe him. But later,
they discovered a colony of wild African parrots was indeed living
in a nearby square. “The move has been challenging for our family
in so many ways, from Anne-Marie’s accident to just getting used to
the cold, grey Brussels weather,” Almada says. “But whenever we see
those parrots, I point them out to the boys and remind them that they
also come from a hot country. If they can adapt, we can too.”

Casamidy
T: [phone]
www.casamidy.com