FIRST YOU NOTICE the floor — an interlocking chain of green, blue and brown traditional handmade Filipino tiles informed by Italy’s Casa degli Atellani, the 15th-century Renaissance palace (originally a pair of houses) gifted by the Duke of Milan to a family of courtiers. On the room’s back wall is a mural of tropical foliage that the Manila-based decorator Junie Rodriguez created himself using different shades of plaster. In front of the wild landscape scene is an antique provincial Chinese wood console, on which sits a 2014 portrait by Siefred Guilaran, “Red Bully,” depicting a late 1800s image of a Filipino native, its title a reference to how the artist feels his country has been treated by China. The middle of the space contains a 19th-century narra wood dining table that once belonged to Rodriguez’s mother, surrounded by a few painted rattan chairs of his own design and others that are 1930s Art Deco or 1970s Chinese fretwork. On the walls are handmade wrought-iron sconces cobbled together from fragments of window grillwork.
So unfurls the heavily layered home that Rodriguez, 56, designed in the middle of greater Manila for his sister Mary Faye Garcia; her husband, Jarie Garcia (both of whom run food businesses); and their three daughters, now in their late teens and 20s. Each of its rooms is a mélange of international references, periods and techniques, as if the 14,500-square-foot, five-bedroom property had been inhabited for decades, even though it was built just five years ago. “The Philippines is a very culturally diverse place — we have Spanish, Chinese and Islamic influences that play into our domestic design, so that eclecticism is sort of a given,” Rodriguez explains on the telephone a few months after showing me the home one muggy May morning. “You have to find a shell that can accommodate that.” The family had originally chosen a more classic, colonial-era mansion to renovate in the suburbs, but Mary Faye, 54, decided she didn’t want her children sitting for hours in Manila’s notorious traffic on their way to school. Instead, they took over a property that their family had rented out since the late 1980s near their last home in the gated community of Bel-Air, which is hidden within the city’s prosperous Makati district, crowded with malls and skyscrapers.
It’s here that Rodriguez — who for decades has worked with his father and mother, Cesar and Fe Rodriguez, on residential and commercial projects throughout the Philippines — envisioned something unexpected: a four-story concrete-and-plaster tower much taller and more brazen than any of the discreet enclave’s other domiciles. The structure was so alien to its surroundings, in fact, that after it started going up, the neighborhood association accused him and his parents of surreptitiously planning an illegal dormitory for Chinese laborers.
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