"On the front nine the mood is different – they’re all laughing," says Jojo with amusement. "After two hours, when these same people go to the back, they’re cursing. Because it’s only a hundred yards, it seems like they can’t forgive themselves if they don’t put it on the green. But that’s what golf is."
A successful mechanical engineer, Jojo and his wife, Geng, run their companies Aeromart Commercial and Industrial Corp. and Lead Marketing Corp. together. After a week’s worth of supplying cleaning chemicals and degreasers to electronics and power companies, or selling spare helicopter parts through bidding, they’re eager to head to their resthouse in Mt. Malarayat Golf & Country Club and Residential Estates.
A haven for golfers and their families, Malarayat is located in Lipa, Batangas, a mere hour’s drive from Manila via the new STAR (Southern Tagalog Arterial Road) Tollway. You don’t have to be a Malarayat member to build in the residential estates, and neither Jojo nor Geng even played golf when they first saw the area, but some X factor – perhaps it was the cool breezes, or maybe it was the stunning sight of green mountains reaching up to the sky – drew the couple like moths to a flame.
"We were one of the first buyers in 1996, when they were still developing the place," recalls Jojo. "My wife saw it, fell in love with the weather, and we just bought it without thinking we were going to build a house later on."
In Manila, the couple and their three children lived in a series of condominiums. They’re currently ensconced in a three-bedroom at Luna tower in Rockwell, but even the plushest of surroundings didn’t prevent bouts with respiratory ailments from the city’s pollution.
"My wife and I were having colds and sneezing attacks, so we came here because we find the weather better than in Manila," Jojo says. "So we said before we end up in the hospital, we’d better come here."
"You really get recharged here," affirms Geng. "Sometimes you just turn off your cell phone."
Luckily, the Joses were friends with Antonio Turalba Sr., head honcho of Activegroup Inc., which built Malarayat. Turalba took a peek at their floor plan and chose the lot they ended up buying , which has an unobstructed view of the 27-hole course. "But Jojo doesn’t play golf," Geng remembers saying. Turalba replied, "Don’t worry; he will."
And he does – twice a week on the two fairways that enclose the 749-square-meter house. His handicap has gone from 32 down to 20 in a year. He’s even installed a couple of spotlights outside so he can play night golf when he’s in the mood.
Best of all, the sport inspired the Joses’ aesthetic when it came to building their hideaway. Modeled after "a house in Florida in a golf course," the concept is East meets West, but with a totally unconventional approach. Outside, the house looks like a typical all-American clapboard house, with an inviting wooden porch encircling it. Inside, it’s outfitted from top to bottom in Philippine woods sourced from old 19th-century houses in Nueva Ecija and Tarlac.
The wooden steps leading up to the house – made out of antique planks – are an early indication of what’s to come. But first you have to ring the bell, and I mean literally ring. The doorbell is an old metal school bell Geng found in Tarlac. "I got it from an elementary school, and I donated a new one," she says, laughing. On the middle step, a frog sculpture crouches over a golf ball that strayed from the links. Now it seems like a lucky talisman guarding the house.
The front doors are crafted from four different kinds of wood – kamagong, molave, narra and ipil-ipil – forming a sort of wooden rainbow with its varied shades of brown.
Inside, you’re struck by the high white ceiling and the airiness of the space. "It was always my wife’s frustration to have a house with high ceilings, so she was asking for something like 20 feet. I think we went 35, 40," says Jojo. "The original plan was for a first and second floor but Geng only wanted one and a half, so we have a loft. If you’re outside, it looks like a two-floor house. But when you come in and look up... a lot of people are amazed by the high ceiling. We love it, too."
Also amazing is the living room’s lighting scheme, another idea of Geng’s. Not only is the ceiling high, it’s sprinkled with 160 halogen pinlights – 80 on each side of the pitched roof – so when the lights are switched on, it’s like illuminating the heavens. All I could think of was Van Gogh’s "Starry Night." "People who come try to figure out what’s the symmetry, but they can’t," he says. "By the end of the day they ask, ‘What’s the pattern?’ I say, ‘No, it’s just somebody up there who drilled holes."
Matchstick blinds can be lowered during the day for privacy, but "at night you can see all the reflections on the glass, so it’s just like there are stars outside when you’re downstairs."
"What Turalba said was correct," notes Geng. "Here, everything’s manmade except for the weather and the mountains."
Of course, starry nights throughout the year come at a price. For the 12 days out of the month that the Joses spend at Malarayat – they normally come on Thursday and stay till Sunday – their electric bill rings in at a hefty P20,000. God forbid a light goes out as well. To avoid damage to the wooden floors, an electrician has to climb scaffolding to replace it.
Malarayat only issued a couple of guidelines when the couple were building their house: a height restriction of nine meters and since the house faces the golf course, they couldn’t hang a clothesline or put a dirty kitchen at the back. "The problem if you have a double fairway is the view of the front must continue going towards the back. So where will you put your clothesline?" asks Jojo. Thus, instead of air-drying their laundry from the city, the Joses bring their country laundry to Rockwell and have it laundered there.
Using no architect and no interior designer, just a foreman and an engineer to do the drawings, the house took 16 months to build thanks to the old-wood interiors, which were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle by Jojo, who had to match the planks by shape, line and color. "If it was yellowish, I’d look for another yellowish one. If it was reddish, the same, so it took really long."
All the wood was sourced from an old, but not ancestral, provincial house, which they had to tear up. "I was just after furniture," claims Jojo. "I ended up buying a house."
Jojo converted all the old narra, kamagong and ipil into floors, the posts outside and balcony railings. "Literally speaking, I was the one who made the floors. My knees went white." The planks were also riddled with holes from old nails, so he had to painstakingly plug each one with putty. "There were more than 1,000 holes, but after 1,000 I stopped counting."
Luckily, carpentry is Jojo’s major hobby. Though the kitchen is dominated by famous potters like Ugu Bigyan and Lanelle Abueva, who supplied the pots and the wall tiles, respectively, the range hood is old wood, and so is the refrigerator case. "It's black wood from a river in Pangasinan that's been underwater for 30 years," Jojo notes with pride. The lighting is all by Keystone.
The living room flows into a dining area, with chairs by Benjie Reyes and a long table made by the Joses’ carpenter, who also built the beds and most of the furniture. Outside on the porch, a picnic table and chairs beckon, but the family prefers to eat indoors because of the flies. "That’s my favorite spot," says Geng. "The whole day you can sit there and watch the golfers, those hotheads," she laughs.
On the first floor, the master bedroom is very quaint, with an escritorio, bed and bathroom counters all made of – what else? – old wood. They protect all this timber with an Australian oil Jojo bought from True Value. "They have a complete range for wood, from preventive to coatings. But we didn’t use coatings, only oil. Coatings will get scratched with white lines. We resanded the old wood, put a sanding sealer, then you put the oil into the fresh wood and wax it." To maintain the wood’s patina and sheen, they first clean it with a cloth before waxing it. "It’s nice to work with old wood because it doesn’t move."
The stairs going up to the second-floor loft is the biggest piece of furniture in the house – Jojo built it by hand using kamagong and ipil-ipil.
If the first floor is all local, however, the loft was built with American wood like Douglas fir sourced from Chicago – excess material from the Joses’ other house in Cainta, which they renovated in ’94. "I overestimated," says Jojo. "Thinking that it’s a shipment, you can’t afford to be short of any material, so I bought more."
A family area in the loft boasts low woven-leather furniture from Padua and lots of pillows for lounging – all the better to enjoy the 60-inch Samsung flat-screen TV, where sons Niccolo and Jose Abel love to watch movies.
Close by is a band setup with electric guitar, organ and a full Yamaha drumkit. Jojo plays everything except the drums, including the 3/4-grand piano downstairs. He loves jazz – "music for white hair," as he calls it –and his family is musically inclined: sister Nora Jose Avanzado used to play piano at the Manila Hotel with John Nicolas, and plays concerts in the United States, where she now resides.
A pinewood ladder leads up to an attic that serves as the boys’ bedroom. While sister Kathryn is in Ithaca, New York, studying Policy Analysis Management at Cornell, her room has been turned into a guestroom with a daybed and snowy-white sheets, all of which Geng had made by her seamstress.
The loft also has its own balcony with a breakfast nook overlooking the greens. The only flaw in this idyll are the gaps in the shower enclosures, because the floor plans were all in English measurements, the conversion into Philippine meters didn’t quite match up. But a little cladding by Jojo serves as an excellent stopgap.
Another Americanism Jojo implemented was building the walls, not out of concrete hollow blocks, as is Filipino custom, but out of plywood, fiberglass insulation, a thermal blanket and cladding. "One thing I always see here is people breaking concrete," he observes. "With this type of wall you can work on your pipes and wiring from the outside, and you don’t have to open up your house to workers so it’s more secure."
The Joses have just bought a two-hectare farm near Malarayat’s back gate – a farm setup where they want to plant some vegetables and at some point in the future build a house with a mini-fish pond.
In the meantime, they’re content with the calming influence of their quiet Malarayat retreat. "When we leave it’s like a small baby wanting to come with us. It’s yelling and screaming not to be left," Jojo says.
But before I leave, he lets on that he has excess wood yet again from this house, which means only one thing: Time to build a new house.