Opening doors to the past

When Gerico Austria and his wife Baby were building their house in a quiet subdivision in Las Piñas in 1996, they had a lot of things to start with. Foremost were the doors – 28 doors to be exact – culled from Gerico’s collection, which he began in the 1980s. Twenty-eight old doors, all with storied pasts that you can barely comprehend the comings and goings that went through them. It is easy to romanticize their provenance, conjure images of what might have taken place in the past hundred years – the slamming in anger, the whispering behind locked doors, the tentative opening to welcome lovers (well, maybe not the two panels that used to be convent doors; others are from old houses in Vigan, Ifugao, Ilocos and Mindanao).

Then there were the door handles that Gerico, on two trips to Paris – in the fall of 1996 and spring of 1997 – hand-carried back to Manila. While his colleagues were touring the city, he was going from one hardware store to another looking for accessories.

An officer at a European airport, upon seeing his heavy load, was prompted to ask, "Are you a carpenter?"

Gerico said, "Yes, I am."

He’s not a carpenter, he never was – he just wanted to avoid a long interrogation. In fact, Gerico Austria has always been in the media side of the advertising industry – having done his time in the big agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Leo Burnett and McCann Erickson – and is today the EVP and chief operating officer of Club Media Asia Inc.

That this man with smooth hands and a killer raspberry iced tea recipe was mistaken for a carpenter would have been fatuous except that on another trip to Paris, he hand-carried yet again another 50 light bulbs with an unusual shape – teardrop bulbs except they have curly ends, almost like the cedilla in the French alphabet or the twisted top of a soft-serve ice cream.

For Gerico, there is no such thing as a hard-to-find piece of furniture or furnishing. Name an almost extinct species of wood (kamagong, balayong, red ipil, yakal and saplungan) and they have it in some part of the house, either as a chair, table, daybed or flooring.

Finding something as common as stained glass, for instance, takes on heroic proportions with him. On a trip to Vigan with his son Allan in 1996, he spotted an old, dilapidated two-story house with stained-glass windows. Some of the panes were already broken due to trucks driving along the highway and pebbles ricocheting off the road and hitting the windows. But the stained glass was beautiful and it crossed his mind that it would be a perfect backdrop for the altar they were to install on the second floor. It was the kind of blue that only time can produce. Gerico knocked on the door and offered to buy the remaining panes of glass. The owners didn’t want to sell, but they did give a price, which was P2,500 for each pane. Gerico went back home to Manila with his son Allan that day, and the next day he took a leave at work and drove 12 hours back to Vigan to persuade the owner to sell. The owner was of two minds about it: their child was graduating from high school, they didn’t want the house to be missing its remaining windows but, on the other hand, they needed the money. Finally, Gerico asked how much they wanted for the three panes. The price came to about P3,500 for each, which was a large amount considering he could have bought new ones for much less. And so Gerico went home with three panes of glass, the color of a blue sky on a particularly nice day.

When they were constructing their cul de sac (the French term literally means "bottom of the bag"), they gave interior designer Eric Paras a complete inventory of what they had: Every piece of beam that came from demolished houses, every architrive that they had sourced from this or that antique dealer, every accessory that was stored for many years in their previous bungalow.

Eric, whose firm also did the architectural design of the house, says, "When we were designing the house, the Mediterranean style was just starting and they were the first in the village to have the façade in ochre. Pretty soon, every house had similar Mediterranean colors it almost became a theme for the subdivision. I planned the interiors based on their inventory of furniture and the sizes of their wooden beams. When the house was done, it was all a matter of fitting the furnishings that they already had. We added very few pieces."

The Austria house, sitting on a 538-sq.m. lot, fulfills basic feng shui requirements, including a water feature in the east section of the property. The interiors bring in the lush outdoors with their double-volume ceiling and tall windows, which were partly due to their desire for openness and partly because they really needed the high ceiling to fit their collection of huge drums from Mindanao.

Baby, whose mother is part of the Sarao family of jeepney manufacturers and is involved in the business, says, "We used to live in a bungalow in BF Resort, Las Piñas, and we had this collection. Inside the house there was barely room to move. There was just an open aisle to pass through the living room. When guests would come over the first thing they’d say was, ‘My God, how did you manage to get all these drums inside?’"

The couple was also inspired by the house of their friends in Ilocos to combine Mediterranean architecture with northern antiques. Thanks to the interior architecture and the modern paintings, the antiques do not overwhelm the place – it’s not at all dark or creepy the way some houses filled with antiques and santos are.

Gerico used to do quite a lot of traveling in the north, Visayas and Mindanao. "Unlike in Manila, you really have nothing to do on your time off, so I would go to curio and antique shops," he says. "You get to know the history of, say, these drums. The Muslims in Mindanao, particularly in Cotabato, Cagayan de Oro and Davao, mababait sila. They would deliver the pieces to Manila even when you hadn’t paid for them yet."

On his fascination with old doors, he says, "I like that they’re made from one solid piece of wood, unlike the new doors today which are fabricated from several pieces. I like their carving and also their histories."

One of his prized possessions is an Ifugao door, which was used for rice storage in the old days. Gerico had the idea of using it as a pantry door but Eric said it was too small. By the time the planning was done, all doors had been accounted for – from the maids’ room to the bathroom doors to the bedrooms – except for this one. Eric decided to install it against a wall in the garden, complete with a tiled canopy, "to break the monotony and create the illusion that there’s another garden beyond."

Actually there really was a gate that led to the house behind the Austrias’. Gerico explains that "the singer Conching Rosal and the owner of this lot were friends and they made a small gate between the two houses so they did not have to go around the block."

They sealed the gate and installed the Ifugao door and when people ask where it leads to, their daughter Angeli answers, "Oh, it leads to the swimming pool." And when guests ask to go there, she’d say, "Sorry, it’s still in its finishing stage."

When asked if the couple has stopped collecting antiques after almost 10 years since they first moved in here, Baby says yes.

Gerico pauses for a long time and looks at his wife, "Well…"

You know what they say about a house never really being complete. But he adds that if he builds another house, it would be modern and minimalist. That should stop him from accumulating more woods and doors, which would please his wife just fine.