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Lifestyles Profile - Eduardo Rivas fall-winter/2000 To many Vallartans it seems that Eduardo Lalo Rivas has been in town forever. His face and voice are familiar: he used to do the local news for Televisa's Channel 4 and more recently for the MVS radio station. But those who haven't heard about Lalo have surely seen the front of his business. Coming into the city from the south, El Sofá is on the very first street to the right. What started as a small workshop for a few clients' upholstery projects eight years ago has become one of the places to go for unique pieces of furniture, especially for great looking, well constructed and super comfortable sofas, including a new line of chaise-loungues. For almost half of his life, Lalo had been juggling two careers: interior design and the media. And it was not until these last couple of years that he gave up other interests to dive into what he discovered is his passion. A good decision one can tell by looking at the sparkle in his eyes when he talks about what's happening to him and El Sofá. "I have been extremely fortunate in finding the right people (22 altogether) to build the perfect team that will enable us to create spaces from scratch." El Sofá is not just doing sofas anymore: with a couple of young architects who graduated in Barcelona, professional designers, seasoned carpenters, etc., the team is now offering a full package: from building homes to landscaping gardens and creating interiors. Lalo's intention is to provide a contemporary outlook in design, with higher quality and more sophistication. "We'd like to spearhead a movement in Vallarta—where we are finding an increasingly demanding clientele†towards a more avant-garde approach to all aspects of design." Plans for the El Sofá showroom are also very exciting and have everything to do with Lalo's mother, Mar'a Fernanda Matos, a well known artist "to whom I owe my sense of harmony and esthetics, and my imagination." Already part of the team, Mar'a Fernanda will soon be the heart of El Sofá when it becomes the showcase for furniture designers from all over the world as well as painters, sculptors and other artists. "She will be of great help in organizing these exhibits, where we wish to display different approaches to living spaces through the conception of different designers." Ambitious? A bit, perhaps, but certainly an undertaking that will take interior design in Vallarta to unexplored heights.

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