Baguio dream house - 1961: A summer house with a view

Baguio City celebrates it centennial next month. A hundred years ago, the city was established as a hill station for the American colonial government. The Americans found our summers too hot for comfort and decided to do what the British had done with Simla in India, and that was to seek higher and cooler alternatives to main centers that were usually along the coast.

Baguio grew from 1910 onwards as a government center and highland retreat for government officials first and later for the rich and powerful. William Cameron Forbes, governor general from 1909 to1912, was the main proponent of Baguio’s development.

Forbes was a true American blueblood from Boston. A descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and son of William Hathaway Forbes, president of the Bell Telephone Company, Cameron was a Harvard graduate and an investment banker before his colonial posting. Here, he strove to fulfill his part in America’s manifest destiny of civilizing their little brown brothers — the Filipinos.

This process of civilizing us was made more difficult with the debilitating heat, so when a mountain location akin to the Adirondacks was discovered (or rediscovered, as the Spanish had already established a settlement near the site), Forbes jumped on the chance to help turn the place into a cool colonial oasis.

To establish a new city that would have not just government complexes, private plots were subdivided and sold to the public. Of course, only the rich or connected could afford to build there. The setting up of this residential enclave gave inspiration to a future developer down in Manila — the Ayalas named Forbes Park after Cameron Forbes in the late 1940s.

It was also after the war that many of the homes in Baguio — damaged in the war — were repaired. The city soon attracted the post-war rich to build summer houses there. By the late 1950s, additional plots, especially those overlooking Burnham Park, gave in to residential development.

One of the landmark homes built in that period was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Juan Cojuangco. Juan is the brother of Jose Cojuangco who is Cory Aquino’s father. They retained the services of Cresenciano C. de Castro (CC de Castro), whom I featured a few weeks back. The site was off Kisad Road in an elevated lot above and with a full view of Burnham Park.

Built on a slope, the house is a split-level modernist home that looks like one of the famous case-study houses in Los Angeles, California but with less glass. The entrance is reached via a semi-circular driveway protected by a cantilevered canopy. The entrance, which was accented by a geometric lily pond, featured sculptures of a dancing girl and a guitar-playing man.

De Castro used a lot of glass. This was to let natural light in and to take advantage of the wonderful views of Baguio, which was then still filled with pine trees. Every major room had a picture window.

The house was mostly reinforced concrete with Baguio stone facing for most of the prominent walls. The rest of the house was in timber, a readily available commodity at the time. The wood was pressure-treated using a process known as Wolmanized, and supplied by the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Company of Manila.

From the entrance one entered an ante sala and then the living room itself. The décor was Japanese-inspired, being the fashion of the day. The interiors were by pioneer Filipino interior designer Willi Fernandez, Doreen’s husband. Aguinaldo’s, Echague, was the source of the furniture while Hooven Philippines supplied the then new product of aluminum framed glass jalousies and sliding doors.

Beside the living room were a music alcove and the dining room. The dining room furniture by Aguinaldo’s again was in a contemporary Oriental theme, with matching buffet table (all ‘60s houses seemed to have this piece of furniture).

The bedrooms were reached via a balcony, which overlooked the hillside. At the end was the master’s bedroom (also in Oriental theme) and a sun deck that directly overlooked the best view — that of Burnham Park below.

The descriptions above come from a 1961 design magazine. In 1999, I accidentally discovered the house while on a trip to Baguio. I was randomly taking photos of old houses from the pre-war days when I happened onto this modern gem.

The house seemed abandoned but retained most of the original elements from the ‘60s. I could not gain access to the interiors but noted the generous spaces, cantilevered projections and balcony.

The view, however, was long gone. Horrid examples of ‘70s and ‘80s architecture had cropped up to block the view. The location lost its value as most of Baguio has spiraled downward in the quality of its surroundings. Long gone is the scent of pine, the colorful hydrangeas and roses, and small-town feel.

Baguio now seems bent on becoming another blight-infested, noisy and polluted Philippine city crammed with malls, traffic and tall buildings that sit shoulder to shoulder on ever decreasing real estate.

Today, there is no room to breathe in Baguio, even if the scent of pine came back. There is no room in the city to step back to enjoy any view as structures squeeze themselves precariously on even the steepest of slopes and block out any views. There is no room, alas, for enjoying any of the elegance, ambience or refinement of old, just the crass commercialism of big-box retailing, fast foods and convenience stores.

There is some hope of recovery; that is if we are to believe reports of various centennial groups and NGOs. The local government and even the Senate have made noises pointing to renewal. Sadly, this may only happen if (God forbid) another earthquake exposes the inanity of unmitigated overbuilding in close to two decades since the last tragic temblor.

The dream of Baguio’s citizens is to recover its old status as the Summer Capital of the Philippines. It has (barely) survived its first hundred years and I do hope that it will survive and prosper for another hundred.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.