The Wily Filipino

The House I Grew Up In.

It's only been in the last year or so that I became interested in what houses looked like. Since then I've had more appreciation for the house I grew up in -- therefore, this guided tour of sorts. (I'm extremely lucky in retrospect to have parents with great aesthetic sense!)

The house was designed by --- [name later, sorry] according to specifications from my folks -- the result of stacks of clippings of architectural magazines -- and construction finished in late 1971.

This is a shot of the "back" of the house (the front door is reserved for visitors). It's actually the first thing you see when you walk up the driveway though.

This is a view of the veranda on the south side of the house. There are stairs on the other side, but everyone used this anyway, so the millstone was placed there belatedly to facilitate climbing over.

More of the west side of the house. (The windows you see are in the kitchen and TV room.)

The east side of the house. (The screened windows are in the living room.)

A view of the veranda on the east side of the house. The sliding door is to my parents' bedroom -- another concession to opening up the house to the garden, but unused for reasons I'll explain later.

Steps in the back in better detail -- those are millstones.

And here's the front door. (Sorry, I forgot to remove the guard railings to keep the dogs out!) The veranda runs all the way around the bedroom part of the house.

A sarimanok stands guard outside.

The same shot, from the opposite direction.

More of the front door. I'm not sure if the previous owner of the antique gallinera actually used to have chickens underneath the seat. The lamps are from a kalesa. That capiz-shell motif repeats throughout the house.

The foyer, kind of (as seen from the hallway). The religious icons are all antique (as are the fire extinguishers). The door -- as is the floor and the dining table -- is made of narra. It's endangered now, but not back in 1971!

A shot of the interior, looking south, as seen from the dining room. Apparently back in the day my folks would host poetry readings, guitar recitals, etc. in the sunken living room. (Usually there'd be big plants inside the house, but just not today.)

A shot of the interior, looking north, as seen from the living room. You can see the dining room, and the kitchen beyond.

More of the living room.

I love the way the screened windows completely fill the living room with light and different shades of green. The rattan furniture is custom-made. (The swing is a real kiddie magnet; I've read many a book in it.) The wood panels are opened in the morning and closed at night (a rather tedious process actually).

Pictures of the garden through the screen windows.

Close up of the furniture and the floor. Those are pretty big slabs of wood there.

More shots of the living room.

The dining room, where my dad is working. (I spent late nights writing my undergraduate thesis in longhand on F. Sionil Jose on that very same table.) Yes, that's one huge slab of narra wood, stained in a different color to contrast with the narra floors.

The TV room (usually filled with junk, and therefore politely hidden from view by the capiz-shell columns) and the kitchen. Our first Radiowealth color TV -- I won it in a nationwide raffle from Klim, after Eddie Mercado pulled out my name from a tambiolo during an episode of Spin-a-Win -- which came encased in ugly wood paneling to make it look like furniture, though no one could have mistaken it for anything else, lived in the TV room.

Our kitchen is pretty functional (that's my mom cooking), but there are always nice little touches like the twigs with little seashells glued onto them.)

And now outside: this is looking toward the driveway entrance.

Plus shots of the garden (that's all my dad's landscaping designs).

I think that it's an aesthetically beautiful house (and I hope you agree). It's not the best-designed house, though: despite the many screened windows, the house traps a lot of heat, so it's not fun to sit in the living room in the summer. (The bedrooms are air-conditioned though.)

The architect's original plan was to have the front door section extend out to the garden as a patio (and therefore making it more open to the outdoors). But this was nixed for the very reason that the sliding doors in my parents' bedroom, or the front door, are never left open -- the breeze, so needed during tropical weather, sucks all the mosquitoes into the house.

The bedrooms are also tiny in comparison, since the floor plan is mostly given over to the "entertaining guests" section. At least my parents have this large walk-in closet, but my brother and I shared a tiny bedroom as teenagers. (My sister had to share her also small bedroom with our books.)

There are two bathrooms, one of which is essentially decorative in function, and so (at its peak, particularly if Izzy's mom and I and and Happy and Clarissa were visiting) seven adults and two children would be queueing up in the one bathroom with a shower.

Otherwise I think it's a damn fine house.

Posted by the wily filipino at June 24, 2007 10:23 AM