While Petra was alive, the house was the epicentre of the Yusay clan â even as most of the sons and daughters married and moved away, either to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, or, in the case of the sons, to Negros Occidental.
The late, great Philippine architect and heritageconservation expert Augusto F VillalĂłn tagged the Yusay-Consing Mansion as hacienda-style, a type that was widespread in the country under the Americans â and, as we shall see, the house also harbours important connections with the Philippine Commonwealth era. The imposing façade, its broad central entrance topped with a
roofed balcony overlooking a neat garden,speaks of the plantation-based affluence of Ilonggos involved in the sugar trade.
The house boasts locally made tiles, hardwood panels and handcrafted elements. However, not all is âarchetypalâ: in this otherwise classic residence, the dining room and kitchen were on the upper floor along with some of the bedrooms. Equally uncommon, the room above the car porch was once a small library.
Throughout, broad circulation spaces facilitate airflow and the lofty ground-floor ceiling likewise contributes to all-important ventilation in this tropical climate. Today, its height accommodates a jaw-dropping chandelier of cascading capiz shells, the centrepiece of the former sala (living room). Here, the ribbed, original ceiling is punctuated by floral timber bosses, while the fielded, panelled balustrades of the hardwood staircase sweep outwards at the base.
According to research by historian Roque Hofileña Jr, Estanislao Yusay was âone of the most brilliant lawyers of Iloilo and Negrosâ, serving as the chief legal counsel of Aniceto Lacson â who, together with Juan Araneta, led the famous 1898 Negros uprising against the Spaniards.
We didnât think of ourselves as living in such a big house. It was simply a home to us. As children, we played inside the house but more usually on the grounds because the grounds measured about a hectare. My father planted mango trees. I used to climb the trees to pick ripe mangoes and eat them while hanging above the street.
Luis Yusay Consing
after the Second World War. When Petra died in 1948, their parents took it over. Nene once told his young nieces how, while standing on the front balcony, he watched the night sky over Molo turn orange as the houses of their relatives and friends went up in flames â torched by either Filipino guerrillas or the American defenders.
It was Horacio who as a young boy was Petraâs chosen favourite; he would sleep in her bedroom with his nurse. Every day at the same hour, Horacio would stand by her window facing Molo Plaza for a glimpse of his uncle Pedro Ditchingâs burgundy Hudson Terraplane â a rare sight on the streets of Iloilo â driving past.
According to Luis, the public life of the house was almost entirely owing to his Papa rather than the shy Yusays. One aunt, Manuela, was the exception; beautiful and coquettish, she was closely involved in the Kahirup Club, a social organisation set up and run by members of Ilonggo
sugar-planter families.
Timoteo Sr was appointed to the governorship of Iloilo twice: the last to serve under an American governor general and the first under the Philippine Commonwealth Government. During his period of office in the 1930s, he would host leaders of the Catholic Church and national politicians in the mansion, including President Manuel L Quezon and Vice President Sergio Osmeña â in grand Ilonggo style.
By the 1960s, Timoteo and Rosario began to spend increasingly more time in Manila. It was their eldest son, Nene, then the President of Passi Sugar Central, who would carry on his parentsâ and grandparentsâ legacies of family stewardship. With their ancestral house still standing, the descendants of Estanislao and Petra Yusay, and Timoteo and Rosario Consing, can continue to draw inspiration from this monument to their achievements.
A ILOILO A
CASA MARIQUIT
Jaro, Iloilo City
An Imperishable World
Until the house came to be known by Salvacion âMariquitâ Javellana Lopezâs sobriquet, she would often refer to her childhood home as the Santa Isabel house, after the Jaro street on which it stands.
When her husband, Fernando âNandingâ Hofileña Lopez, a former Vice President of the Philippines, passed away in 1993 and their eldest grandson asked her where she wanted to live, she said, âIn Santa Isabel.â
Perhaps this was a reference to the area surrounding Jaro Cathedral five minutes away; after all, Santa Isabel is the Spanish variation of St Elizabeth, the cathedralâs patron saint from Hungary. It may seem strange that 13th-century Spain should have a connection to a Hungarian saint, but
King James I of Aragon was married to a princess of the Hungarian House of ĂrpĂĄd: Violant â or, in Spanish, Yolanda de HungrĂa â providing another example of the Philippinesâ unusually varied cultural connections with the wider world.
On hearing his grandmotherâs preference, Robert âPanchitoâ Lopez Puckett replied, âIf so, we will have to fix it up first.â The same restoration team that had worked on the walled city of Intramuros in Manila was commissioned to
This house occupies a special place in Iloilo history. I appreciate it even more now because I see that others do. You donât get houses like this anymore.
Risa Maria Lourdes O. Peña Sarabia, great-granddaughter of Salvacion âMariquitâ Javellana Lopez
undertake the project. âIt took a full year with 20 labourers,â recalls Panchito. âThey chipped the white paint off the external brickwork, and the paint from the walls inside. Twenty coats of paint had been added through the years by various tenants. My grandmother hadnât lived in that house since she eloped with my grandfather in 1924.â
The original mahogany floors were stripped of accumulated wax and the painted internal walls replaced with wood panelling. The roof was likewise changed. âAfter everything sheâd spent on the work, and the fact that she gave it to us, we decided to call it Casa Mariquit.â Today, Panchito and his half-brother Rito âJudgeeâ Lopez Peña are co-owners of this fine example of a bahay na bato (âhouse of stoneâ) structure built during Spanish colonial rule. It is possibly one of the most accessible of Iloiloâs ancestral homes still owned by the original family. Visitors are often toured around by the caretaker, who lives on the grounds.
Casa Mariquit is said to have been constructed in 1803 (making it by far the oldest of the houses in this book). It
A ILOILO A
PISON ANCESTRAL HOUSE
Molo, Iloilo City
A ILOILO A
CONCEPCION CHALET
Jaro, Iloilo City
As the 1930s progressed, it was the steamship rather than the skyscraper that became the favoured symbol of modernity. The 1930s were the halcyon days of the great transatlantic ocean liners.
Bevis Hillier and Stephen Escritt, Art Deco Style, London: Phaidon Press, 1997, p. 79
Eugenio had effectively migrated to Manila with his wife, Pacita Moreno, and their children â Eugenio Jr (known as âGenyâ), Oscar, Presentacion, Manuel and Roberto â who grew up there.
Panchito continues, âFernando Lopez Jr, my Uncle Junjee, was actually the one who lived in Boat House most of the time. But my grandfather and I also lived there.
âEugenio was very avant-garde and modern. He strove for excellence in everything. He built that very nice, Miamistyle art-deco Boat House. Unfortunately, Fernandoâs house was burnt down by the Japanese during the war, but they spared Boat House because the Japanese turned it into their headquarters.â
He says that when Fernandoâs family occupied Boat House, it was not quite as polished as it looks today âparticularly since its restoration in the 1990s by Fernando âPandoâ Ocampo Jr, the original architectâs son. Says Panchito, âFernando did not have the same taste as Eugenio. When we lived in Boat House, it was a very spartan house where my grandfather would welcome people from all walks of life. Of course, there was a long table to accommodate different
horseshoe table and fountain in the dining room, a space daringly balanced above the wide staircase.
The house is planned in a Beaux-Arts manner, it is true, but the designers â local civil engineers M Salas & C Lopez, rather than an architect â skilfully manipulated the layout to incorporate within a nominally symmetrical plan a series of ingenious variations. For instance, a door to the dining room, set in the latterâs curving wall, is mirrored not by another doorway but by the blank wall of a projecting bay sheltering a wash-hand basin and a passageway to an external terrace wrapping the room. A landing area in the form of a curved, chapel-style apse is suggested by a sweep of columns, but the space to one side is occupied by a single, deep sala while that on the other is divided into an aisle-like passageway and smaller servantsâ quarters within the same bay depth.
Thus, what seems at first glance to be a straightforwardly Neoclassical arrangement slowly reveals itself to be an almost Mannerist composition â and the effect continues into the decoration of this remarkable space. Heavy wooden cornices are broken into short lengths where interrupted by intervening elements such as curved window heads, and those on either side
of the tall, curved-headed doorways are made to cap projecting bay surfaces in a different-coloured render, tightly hemming the timber-bordered doorways.
The capitals of the columns framing the landing space are formed exclusively from triglyphs and metopes âborrowedâ from Ancient Greek temple friezes. These stone decorative devices originally depicted, respectively, wooden beam-ends and the spaces between them transposed from timber into masonry. In fact, they prove ideally suited here to being wrapped around the tops of circular column shafts in yet a further, mannered incarnation. On the curved walls of the dining room and at the opposite edge of the huge landing, the heavy timber cornices are reduced to decorative elements, âfloatingâ on the upper walls like some Postmodernist gesture decades before Postmodernism was conceived.
A processional hardwood staircase leading to the houseâs upper storey is interrupted by a narrow landing flanked by an antique ceremonial chair at one end and a cabinet overflowing with dark wine bottles at the other â their aging, ribald labels marking them out as collectorsâ items. In this space, one has a whiff of the rich labyrinth above: a dwelling unlike any other ancestral house the authors have seen in Iloilo to date.
Even when I was three or four years old, I would go to the house and play. I can say I was Lolo Celsoâs favourite, as he had no children, and his family was my fatherâs family. That house has so many memories for me as I grew up there. I knew Lolo Celso travelled a lot and he probably got all the ideas for it from somebody he met abroad. We do wonder where all the ideas came from, including that horseshoe table.
Vanessa Ledesma Suatengco, daughter of Zafiro Jalbuena Ledesma
and kamagong wood. Although Art Deco in appearance, the design is pure Lizares.
A full-length portrait of Simplicio and Eleuteria dominates the room. Luigi Lizares Yunque, Luciâs son, plans to restore the image. âIt was originally a black-and-white photograph that had been blown up and painted over. At first, I thought it was a painting.â
The upstairs hallway leads directly to a magnificent smoking room, unique in its day. Two rows of Art Deco club chairs â made, like most of the furniture here, by the House of Puyat â are framed by intricately carved wooden columns. The roomâs tall, round-headed windows look out over the town plaza from above a narrow porte-cochĂšre.
On one side of the hall is the formal wood-panelled dining room, with a table that sits 24 â so long they had to break down a wall to install it. A Second World War bomb is said to have dropped on it; the missile failed to explode and the table survived its weight. The backs of the dining chairs were made to measure, an exact fit for the wall panels.
The floor incorporates motifs that depict the story of the sugar industry. The two carabaos [water buffalo] are our beasts of burden. The sun denotes energy, and here is the sugarcane. The âLâ monogrammed on these sacks of sugar cane stands for Lizares.
Luci Lizares Yunque
When the original house was built in 1872, there were no ventanillas, everything was closed, and there was no air. But 17 years later, in 1889, Lola Dicangâs renovation included the staircase, the four windows and arches. They actually finished the whole house, including the cistern, in 1904. Itâs all in her notes.
Adrian âAdjieâ Lizares, custodian, great-grandson of âTana Dicangâ
of transport in the large open space of the ground-floor silong. Instead of two-wheeled carriages, however, here it is an orimon â a small, shoulder-held form of sedan chair. This would have been used to carry older and more infirm members of the household up the steep, grand timber staircase but also, shaded by an umbrella in high summer, outside on the street.
That staircase certainly seems to have exerted a fascination on the buildingâs occupants: an external set of semicircular steps leads up to the window sill of its low, generous first landing. This was actually an addition during the 1950s, allowing the ladies who lived in the house to enter the driveway in their cars, step out and ascend, via that window, straight upstairs.
The long, thin residence is even set perpendicular to the street â somewhat in the manner of a lavish, extravagantly proportioned coaching house. However, the buildingâs solitary cavernous carriage doorway confirms its true provenance as a family dwelling. With its lower storey of painted or rendered brick (clearly evidenced by a bull-nosed coping course) topped by a timber-panelled upper storey, it is in fact the archetypal house modelled on the masonry-based bahay na bato (house of stone), albeit appreciably older than other examples. An information board in the silong discloses, âThe walls that wrapped the ground floor areas are constructed of stone bound together with an organic mortar and clad on the exterior by rare quarried coral âcoquinaâ and brick, and covered with lime-washâ â referencing the soft, whitish coquina rock, comprising marine-shell and coral fragments, that was used in a similar way to the seashell lime plaster chunam, which gave the British edifices of 19th-century Madras (now Chennai) such a lustrous sheen.
