Rooms with a past
April 24, 2004 | 12:00am
No other than the old Osmeña mansion in Cebu City, once known as Cebu’s "White House," would have made a better setting for "Rooms With A Past," the first of the Zee Deezine Series mounted in March by the city’s arbiter of taste, the Zee Lifestyle Magazine.
Cebu is like a gloriously decaying grand lady with luscious stories to tell. The Osmeña house is one such story, and it intersects personal and the city’s histories. The house was a gift from Don Sergio Osmeña’s second wife, Doña Esperanza Limjap, when he, the first President of the Philippine Republic and one of the country’s greatest statesmen, decided to retire from public office. It was here that the couple spent their remaining years.
The house was acquired and restored by the College Assurance Plan (CAP) in 1984 whose offices now occupy the ground floor; the second floor holds the Osmeña Memorabilia, a trove of personal belongings, rare pictures and valuable documents. CAP’s present chairman is, quite felicitously, the educator and cultural historian Dr. Alejandro R. Roces.
It was this second floor that the Zee Deezine Series transformed into rooms with a past, the eminent idea being, according to conceptualizer and Zee publisher Eva Gullas, "to combine the spirit of Cebu’s postcolonial heritage with the vibrancy of the furniture and furnishings produced on the island today." To interpret this dynamic fusion of old and new, Eva Gullas chose interior designer Rosebud Sala and furniture designers Kenneth Cobonpue and Luisa de los Santos Robinson. Their interpretations were both testaments to their cherished personal esthetics and premonitions of their design directions in the future.
Rosebud Sala, whose reputation in interior design among rich men’s wives in Cebu, Bacolod, Manila and San Francisco owes to her eye for tasteful, discreet luxe, re-created the Osmena house dining room to evoke genteel evenings when guests lingered at the table sipping their après-dinner liqueur and coffee and indulging in gossip with eyebrows elegantly raised.
Under the old chandelier that has been retained in the dining room when the house became a museum, Rosebud laid out a 12-seater table of whole tugas wood, warm and smooth to the touch, whose woven cane chairs are upholstered in mustard-colored silk, and set on it heirloom china and silverware and glassware, and long-stem glass vases for centerpieces. Contrasting with the polish of old wood and gleam of glass are the lushly green plants from the vast gardens of landscaper Jaime Chua in oxblood porcelain pots in the corners of the room and on the sideboard.
The wall behind the sideboard Rosebud covered with a huge panel of wood with splendid bas relief; behind this wall first-time visitors to the museum were delightfully surprised to see the MacArthur room, where the general slept during his last visit to Don Sergio and which now holds the grand 1951 Cadillac of the don.
Rosebud, who has had no formal education in interior design – she got married soon after high school from Assumption College in Herran to a scion of the prominent Escano clan in Cebu – credits the influence of architect Toto Unson on her work. "He opened my eyes to look at proportion and harmony in colors," she says. These qualities will surely continue to mark her interior designs – even 10 years from now when, "with the world being as it is now, who knows, we might be designing bomb shelters." Consequently, she adds, consideration for the environment will be "a big influence on design options," especially on the materials to use. Whatever these materials will be, she will still be loathe to see "a room full of furniture of every style with clashing colors and tabletops overflowing with objects."
The living room and bedroom are the handiwork of Cobonpue and Robinson, "soul siblings" as Gullas describes them. These rooms, as created by these two internationally known furniture designers, Zee also observes, "will have no problem fitting into the apartments of old Europe...or a huge loft in New York’s trendy Nolita district."
Cobonpue conjured a bedroom suite dominated by his "Voyager" bed, made of buri and steel and shaped like a boat wherein, he says, "you can sleep off to another world." This bed has been exhibited in Cologne and New York, prompting numerous "must-have" calls, some from as far as Switzerland. The amazing bed is accompanied by sidetables with laminated veneer tops by Robinson; at its foot are Cobonpue’s "Kabuki" buffet cabinet of simulated bamboo-groove design and a "Manila" lounge chair of bamboo and rattan, fashioned after a botaca.
A curiouser and eye-catching piece of furniture in the bedroom is a very light-weight chair with a very organic-looking design. What is it made of? Plastic? No such thing. It is made of the sturdy and light carbon fibers that are used for golf clubs and tennis racquets. The chair, which Cobonpue says, "has never been seen before in the world," is the brainchild of the very edgy designers Marcel Wanders and Bertjan Pot of Holland and which Cobonpue is manufacturing for their company. After this unheralded presence in "Rooms With A Past" before unsuspecting audiences, the chair will be shown to global audiences in Milan in April.
Cobonpue graduated with the highest honors in industrial design from the Pratt Institute in New York; his works have been featured in international home interiors and furniture design publications. His Yin and Yang chairs, which embody his idea of a perfect design, the "beautiful integration of form and function," have been the most photographed furniture he has ever done and have made their way to books, television and print.
In the future, he would like to experiment with plastic and composite hybrids in combination with natural materials, but he would not be designing "things used to kill people, or things that do not profess beauty in this world."
Cebu Moderne, without its fatal attractions, is what inspires Cobonpue and Robinson in their personal style and design principles, Kenneth for minimalist Interior Crafts and Luisa for her boutique funishings shop Accessoria. Luisa, who worked for seven years at the Design Center of the Philippines in Manila, designed in 1985 a rattan cafe chair with concealed metal supports on the joints, freeing it of the conventional bindings and braces, which was bought by a trendsetting German furniture company. "I’ve been seeing copies of this chair everywhere since then," says Luisa.
Luisa Robinson designed the living room/den with a past with an ingenious combination of indigenous natural materials with suede and fiberglass. Quite remarkable are her comfortable round chairs of raffia, dyed a beautiful russet or in natural ecru, decorative laminated vases made of the sig-id grass, fiberglass lamps, and resin-based accessories. "I like working with resins as a base material," she says. "I can shape it into any form I want and incorporate any other material in it." But she’s not saying how she’ll incorporate resin into what she sees as her designs in the future: Cars and airplanes.
The "Rooms With A Past" exhibit also featured a series of lectures, also at the Osmeña House (better known to taxi drivers as the CAP Museum), conducted by Melva Java and Joy Onasawa of the Cebu Conservation Society. The Zee Deezine Series, Eva Gullas promises, will hold yearly themed exhibits of the best and the trendiest in home furnishings, fashion and accessories, cuisine, leisure and sports, and hotel offerings in Cebu.
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