About
Two founders. Two disciplines. One team, in Dubai.
Monica De Hostos
Founder & Design Director
Diego Degaudenzi
Founder & Managing Director
About
Monica De Hostos
Founder & Design Director
Diego Degaudenzi
Founder & Managing Director
The Studio
Borco is a founder-led studio, built on a simple conviction: the company should be arranged around the client, not the other way around. Monica leads the design. Diego leads the business. Both are present from the first briefing to the last site visit, and the studio reshapes itself, project by project, to the people it is working for.
Monica trained inside a design studio and learned the craft from the drawing board outward — material, proportion, light, the hundred small decisions that give a room its quiet. Diego came in from the client’s chair, having run and commissioned projects across hospitality and development. Behind them sits a studio team of designers, draughtspeople, and project managers; but Monica and Diego lead every project themselves, from the first briefing to the last site visit, because a founder-led studio only works if the founders are the ones in the room.
Philosophy
We believe the good rooms, the ones you keep going back to, are the ones where someone cared for a long time about something small. The choice of a handle. The depth of a banquette. The way the light falls on a wall at nine at night. A restaurant or a home can be beautiful in a photograph and lifeless in person; what separates the two is the hours spent on the details no one was asked about.
Our work is to put those hours in — and to be present enough to see the decisions that only become visible on site. That is the part of the job we will not hand over.
Sectors
Most of what we do is hospitality — restaurants, bars, hotel F&B, and the quieter moments inside hotels. We design rooms that guests remember and operators can actually run: a kitchen pass that works at full covers, a banquette that reads well and wears well, a bar that a bartender can love. The job is to balance atmosphere against operation, and we spend most of the project holding that line.
We take on a select number of private houses and apartments a year, for clients who want the same level of care applied to where they live. The hours per square metre are often greater. It is the most personal work we do, and the work where the founder-led model matters most.
“Our job is not to impose a vision. It is to understand yours, and make it better than you imagined.”
Monica De Hostos & Diego Degaudenzi — Founders