The Woman Who Brought a Bathtub
How Janet Morais joined GALA8, and why one unexpected idea changed the shape of the entire evening.
The introduction came through Bruno, a representative of Azimut Yachts and one of the first people connected to the GALA8 project. He said: there is a woman you need to meet. She is extraordinary. That was the entire briefing.
Janet Morais founded KOKET and DeMorais International. She discovered Boca do Lobo in a luxury magazine while visiting Portugal in 2007, saw a piece of furniture, understood immediately that it was something different, and spent the years since building a life and a business around Portuguese craftsmanship and design. KOKET sits where seduction, material, and precision meet. Love Happens Magazine, which she also runs, covers the world she has spent her career inside.
When Dmitry Ostrovsky and Janet Morais met for the first time — on location, walking the space at Pátio da Galé — the conversation was going in the usual direction. Logistics. Possibilities. What fits where.
Then Janet stopped and said: you know, I have this bathtub. A designer piece. What if we put it somewhere as an installation?
That was the moment.
Suggesting it required a particular kind of thinking — the kind that does not separate the beautiful from the functional, that sees a venue as an experience to build rather than a space to fill. Dmitry's response was immediate: yes. The people worth working with are the ones who arrive with ideas nobody asked for.
What Janet brought to GALA8 went beyond the objects in the room. She brought a way of seeing the evening. A perspective that made GALA8 look different from what anyone had originally imagined — better in the way that only happens when the right person decides to actually put themselves into something.
She is a Friend of GALA8 now — someone who understood what this was before it was finished, and contributed to it becoming what it is.
