We are standing in the foyer of their newly built, Mediterranean-style house, the home she and her husband of four years, Dr. Vic Lopez, moved into just three months ago. She was pointing to the chandelier hanging in her dining room and said she was attracted by it because of the heart-shaped Swarovski crystals around it. It is quite unusual, as most chandeliers have teardrop crystals, which she doesn’t like.
Her statement about love is the perfect opening to ask her about the events around 10 years ago, which made headlines in the entertainment section of every newspaper, blurb on every magazine cover, and topic of TV talk shows.
Anyone who was capable of reading in the mid-’90s would have known the name Minguita Padilla. She had just established the Eye Bank then, a nonprofit organization devoted to the procurement and processing of transplantable eye tissue for the blind. While people were interested in her humanitarian work, it was her love life that they were all agog about. Apparently, the lady had followed her heart and it led her straight to headline hell.
But at the moment, even as she says she is motivated only by love and we segue into questions about the past, she’s not biting. Well, at least not yet. We’ve known her for only half an hour anyway.
What she wants to talk about is how the land her house is built on called to her. The moment she saw this lot in a Makati village, she fell in love with it. She and her husband were in the market for a property when they happened to drive past this old house that looked like it was going to fall apart at any moment and it was sitting right smack in the middle of two lots.
When she got home, she told her husband Vic Lopez, "I found the lot we’re going to buy."
He said, "Is it for sale?"
She said, "No, but it will be."
Sure enough, one of their neighbors knew the owner and it turned out that he wanted to sell. Minguita said she was interested and "got a very good price" for it. "And we never met each other until the day we paid him," she says.
This series of fortunate events might be attributed to luck or serendipity or the fact that she had "claimed" it early. Or, if you’re superstitious, you could say she could have had a little help from friendly spirits.
Even before negotiations with the owner were finalized, Minguita had excitedly told her mother, Louise Ellen Belling-Padilla, that she had found her dream lot on which to build her dream house. Her mother advised her to take a psychic to see it. To humor her, Minguita contacted her friend Jinky Datiles Amores.
Jinky said, "Wait a minute, I’ve been there before with a Chinese client who wanted me to look at the lot."
Obviously that sale didn’t push through and Jinky said she knew why. It turned out that at one corner of the property stood a huge, hundred-year-old mango tree, and when the potential buyer saw it, he said aloud that the first thing he was going to do was to cut the tree.
Minguita relates, "When Jinky heard what her client said, she felt shivers down her spine and she was scared because, according to her, the tree is enchanted. Whether you believe in these things or not, Jinky told me that the tree is like a portal to this community of white dwarves – supposedly duwende as opposed to the black ones. She said that what the buyer said had offended the land."
The strange thing is, when Minguita first saw the lot, what attracted her to it was the huge tree. Stranger still is that shortly after the owner made the sale to the couple, he passed away. It was almost as if he was waiting for someone like her to take this property out of his hands.
"I really believe that things happen when they’re supposed to happen. You just have to be attentive to the signs and to follow them," she says.
The two doctors were certainly paying attention to the signs that would lead them to the architect that would build their house. When they attended parties, they made sure that they sat next to an architect and would begin talking to him without necessarily revealing that they were shopping for one.
It was by chance that they met architect Gimmy Garcia at one party. They found out that he had done the renovation of a building in Iloilo that was owned by her cousin, and that he was related to her sister-in-law.
"We started chatting and we liked him because he wasn’t pushy. He isn’t the type who forces what he wants on you. A lot of architects are so pushy that you end up with a house they like but you don’t like. I know so many people who ended up fighting with their architects because they were forced to buy more expensive materials or follow a design they didn’t like. Gimmy listens, he tells you what he thinks, gives his suggestions and then he steps back."
To be fair, Minguita’s brief was short and simple: She wanted a Mediterranean house because for her it’s a classic style, it’s a perfect fit for our climate and it will still look good years from now. The interiors should be open, uncluttered and practical. The house should fit the lifestyle of the couple, which involves a lot of entertaining. It should be a bright, happy house, one that lifted the spirits.
While Minguita took charge of the details, her husband had one teeny-weeny request: He should have a hobby room where he could tinker with electronics, take things apart and put them together again.
That was a deal as great as any wife could get.
The story of how Dr. Vic Lopez won over his mother-in-law has a lot to do with his skills with a sewing machine. As Minguita relates with absolute candor, her mother Louise, even when the two doctors had already tied the knot, wasn’t so sure she liked this famous surgeon.
One day, Louise came home with two brand-new pairs of jeans that were too long for her. "He volunteered to hem them with his sewing machine," Minguita says, laughing. "After he fixed her maong, she’d proudly tell all her friends, ‘You know who sewed my pants? My son-in-law – and he’s an eye surgeon, too.’ When he was courting me, he even sewed me scrubs for the OR. Another time, he sewed matching seersucker scrubs for him and for me."
How strange for a man to be so adept at sewing (by the way, she does fine embroidery, too) when his other hobbies include tinkering with electronics, doing carpentry, playing soccer and shooting pistols.
"You know why? Because when he grew up he didn’t have a lot of money. His parents made them learn how to make tipid, kung masisira ang pantalon niya he had to sew it himself, and to earn extra money, he would sew bags and sell them to his sister’s friends," says Minguita proudly.
Dr. Vic’s hobby room in the basement of the house would make any obsessive-compulsive happy. We’ve never seen such a neat place for so many tools. The metal-sheet worktop is immaculately clean, there are tiny plastic drawers for nails and screws, and the gypsum-board wall is organized with hooks so that power tools, cables and electrical cords are hanging neatly. The room is equipped with a ref, an air-con and its own bathroom, too.
According to Minguita, this is how her husband relaxes. He likes working with his hands – which comes as no surprise since Dr. Lopez is well known in his profession as a specialist in oculo-plasty or cosmetic and reconstructive surgery for the eyes.
"He’s a handyman," says Minguita.
It’s a little unfair that while people know of her husband’s skills outside the operating room (he once built her bookshelves and wired her entire clinic), they assume she has zero skill in the kitchen. Perhaps it’s because she grew up in privileged circumstances – her father is the late Supreme Court Justice Teodoro Padilla; her mother is a former Miss Lux and according to Minguita such a dead ringer for American actress Jane Russell that she once discovered faded clippings in her father’s desk that had two photographs side-by-side – one of her mother and the other of Russell; her great-grandfather was the doctor of the Katipuneros and he has a street named after him in Manila; and each generation of Padilla has well-known lawyers and doctors – with the lawyers winning out in the tally.
"People assume I can’t cook," says this domestic diva who identifies with Nigella Lawson. "Even my husband never knew I could cook. I have a very good pancit molo recipe, I cook pasta, everyday meals and gourmet dishes. When we were building the house, I was very particular about the kitchen. I wanted a stylish, traditional but functional kitchen."
That’s exactly how the entire house could be described: Very efficient in its layout, graceful without being pretentious.
"When we were designing the house, we told architect Gimmy Garcia that we wanted this kind of open layout, we wanted glass windows so that when you’re inside you still feel like you’re in the garden."
As soon as you enter the house, your eyes go straight to the garden because there are no solid walls. Frameless glass covers the entire expanse of the wall, giving you a view of the modest-sized garden with its mango tree and koi pond. Minguita loves the garden so much that she sits there in the afternoons with a glass of wine to reflect and meditate.
The only caveat of having a frameless glass wall is that guests tend to bump into the doors. As for the mango tree, it was so huge that it was covering the old house, which they tore down to build a new one, so they had to trim the tree – but with permission. According to the architect, Vic "asked permission" from the duwende and scattered pieces of Nips chocolate to appease them. Whether it was the birds or spirits that picked them up is anybody’s guess – but the chocolates would disappear after a day or two.
The process of building their dream house was an eye-opening experience for Minguita. "This house taught me that I am so much more patient than I thought. I also realized I had an eye for detail, that I could spot things and put them together well. I also realized that Vic could carve wood. I’ve always known that he has an eye for beauty, but not that he has a very keen eye for details. I was very grateful that he was around during the construction."
Gimmy adds, "We built this house in a year and a half. It could have been quicker, but a house really takes longer to build. A commercial establishment is always rushed because the main point is for it to open soon and make money. With a house, you have the luxury of making sure it is executed properly."
This 620-sq.m. house was designed in such a way that you can close off rooms in the ground floor – the living room, dining room, lanai, kitchen and den – to keep the air-conditioning system efficient and yet you don’t lose the view of the garden. There’s also a lot of empty floor space (she hates filling up every nook and cranny), which is just right since the couple loves to dance when they host parties for colleagues and friends.
As for their private quarters, two-thirds of the second floor is the master suite, which is connected to separate dressing rooms and bathrooms, and separate studies. The bedroom itself is so big a sitting area is still being put together. One wall is dominated by a 70-inch TV set. Minguita says dryly, "My husband has his priorities."
In the basement are the driver’s room and the maid’s room, the latter with its own kitchen, sitting room and bathroom, a storage room and Vic’s hobby room.
You can say their home is a perfect metaphor for the lives they lead – together but with the luxury of having separate spaces when they need to do their own thing.
"Every time I come home, I feel blessed that I have such a house," says Minguita. "It’s a very restful and peaceful house."
Building the house could also be a metaphor for their life together: There were a lot of difficulties along the way, things didn’t go as planned, they took a lot of detours, but it was well worth it for the happy ending.
Minguita relates how she and her husband met. "I was an intern at Makati Med and Vic was training in the US. When I went back to UP for my residency, he came back to Makati Med. I used to visit Vicki Belo who was taking her residency there and that’s when I met Vic.. We didn’t end up together then, it took a long time, a very circuitous route, and then boom. He was torpe eh, too shy. He was a little intimidated, he felt that at the time he had nothing to offer. But Vicki, from the very start, kept pushing and arranging things, telling us, ‘You two should be together,’ but nothing developed. I used to go to Makati Med because we didn’t have a laser machine at UP and I wanted to learn how to laser for glaucoma. This was around 1987 or 1988. Dr. Sevilla of Makati Med used to try to match us, too. He’d assign Vic to teach me. When Vic finally decided to act on it, I had a boyfriend naman. It was like the movies, nagkaka-salisihan. After that, we went our separate ways, we married other people. Eventually, our paths crossed again after both of us went through hell. I always say maybe we had to go through that to realize that we were meant for each other. You have to learn things the hard way."
As for building their house, even the catastrophes such as missing deadlines or having the wrong color of tiles delivered or not finding the right furniture didn’t discourage the couple.
Dr. Padilla looks at it this way: "After you go through hell in your personal life, you can handle anything."