In 2019, I started renovating our house which is also my father’s ancestral home. I tried to decipher what is the current style of our house after taking note of the very prominent columns with horizontal grooves. I soon realized that our previous architect was inspired by a corner stone treatment, a feature originally from European brick/stone houses, that has been adopted with a variety of European motifs conveniently labelled in the Philippines as Mediterranean. My effort to create a unified motif, and perhaps a design that best represents us, led me to discover that we were living in a hodge-podge of foreign styles.
Contemporary American in Avida Settings, Modern Asian in Avida Nuvali, Modern Tropical in Antel Grand Village, and Mediterranean in Portofino and Camellas, there seem to be an endless list of foreign-inspired styling that housing developers have come up with to sell to Filipinos. Real estate experts today list popular house style/design in the Philippines; and most of which are derivatives or inspired by foreign architecture. These foreign styles have been created, popularized, and molded for the respective foreign countries. Still we, Filipino developers, architects/designers, contractors, and home buyers, continue to finance, design, build, and buy these developments that seem to resemble living overseas despite being ill-fitting with local culture, climate, and available materials. Instead of looking for what these foreign styles lack in appropriations, we go around it. We compromise certain features or materials of these styles to make it adaptable to Filipino settings. And we are not shy about it, we dream of living in these villages.
Discussing these foreign-inspired house designs, makes us want to look back and revisit what we had. Perhaps when discussing traditional Philippine houses, nothing comes to mind more colorful than the Bahay Kubo which later evolved to Bahay na Bato. There is a physical and socio-cultural pattern in this evolution, a pattern of Filipinizing. How do we, Filipinos, Filipinize (and personalize) our abodes and what it reveals about us?
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