Wrapped in a silken cocoon

Jeannie Goulbourn’s fabrics hang in Madonna’s windows. She’s also supplied her special silk weaves to design houses like Chanel, Dior, Christian Lacroix and Nina Ricci. So you couldn’t be faulted for thinking her house, located in a Makati village, would look like a pop star’s by way of haute-couture designer. And you wouldn’t be more wrong.

Your first impression when you enter the house is that yes, the fashion designer behind Silk Cocoon lives here. In the foyer, swathes of transparent silk abaca sway like curtains in the breeze, allowing you a tantalizing glimpse of light and space beyond. Ascend a few marble steps and you’ll find practically the entire living area spread out before you — open to an outdoor garden and pool. The lack of walls, free flow of air and feel of nature being invited indoors make it seem like the Goulbourns live in a rest house near some beach, not a residential abode in the middle of the city.

“I wanted all the doors open,” says Jeannie about the semi-detached, multi-level house. “Actually I wanted my two daughters to have all their parties here. But we were — how do you say it? — conservative . So they opted to go to houses where the parents were not so conservative.”

Jeannie’s Chinese heritage is evident everywhere, most especially in two black-and-white photographs that hang in the upstairs foyer. “Those are my great grandparents from Xiamen, China,” she says. “They must be about 150 years old.”

“Those portraits are a real prize,” adds Sydney Goulbourn, Jeannie’s husband. They found them during a visit to Jeannie’s aunts. “They said, ‘You know, I think there are pictures of our grandparents, not even in tubes, just rolled up,’” recounts Syd. “I thought, what a discovery. I brought it to Hong Kong, where they know how to handle these things. They restored and framed them using non-reflective glass.”

Canadian Syd, an insurance man who came to the Philippines on business and never left, thanks to Jeannie, is ironically the art collector of the family. Of the two daughters who grew up in this 20-year-old house, Katrina, the elder, took after Jeannie, and is currently designing bridal gowns for Silk Cocoon, while Natasha, the younger, was more like her father, collecting antiques and choosing new fabrics for the furniture every year.

For 30 years, Jean Goulbourn was the prime purveyor of ladies’ ready-to-wear with her label JMGoulbourn at SM Shoemart stores. She studied pattern design at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and was the first Asian fashion editor at McCall’s magazine, where she worked for over three years.

Back in the Philippines, Jeannie wanted handwoven Philippine silk to earn the global recognition it deserved, so she formed Silk Cocoon, which creates unique silk textiles for use in home interiors and fashion. To date, one of her most proud achievements was designing barong Tagalogs for all the APEC delegates to wear in 1996.

As we walk through Jeannie’s home floor by floor, we see the rest of the living space is full of intriguing bits of Chinoiserie. “Everyone talks about this coromandel,” says Jeannie, pointing to the 10-panel market scene she commissioned in China. “Normally this is in red or gold and black, but I went there myself to talk to the artist. I brought all my furniture covers to be able to match it, including the color of the marble.”

Next to the living room, a light-filled atrium with skylight shows off one of Jeannie’s own collections: about half a dozen hanging birdcages that would look at home by an emperor’s side as they would in an oriental-flavored home. “I hand-carried some of those from China,” claims Jeannie. “I want to do more. Because in China, even the simplest people have birds — they normally have the talking birds, though, the mynas.”

eannie’s typical workday goes like this: She wakes up at 6:30 a.m., works out at the gym or does tai chi daily at 7:15, then she gets back home at around 8:30 a.m. After showering, she starts making phone calls at 9 in the morning to her staff. Having worked in the garment industry for over 30 years, she and her employees can shift almost into autopilot, where she manages them mostly from a distance.

“Our focus now in Silk Cocoon is we want to expand the men’s shirts for export. As my friend Washington SyCip said, ‘I think it’s time you bring the barong to Wall Street.’ Because men don’t want to wear neckties anymore, and if you saw the last collection of Prada for men, they were wearing shirts outside the trouser, over on top, which is perfect for linen barongs.” This year, then, expect New York City to get its first taste of the classically Pinoy barong, given a modern edge with a few of Goulbourn’s contemporary twists.

The house is filled with a wealth of good memories, and has been the site of many a great dinner as well. Syd’s grandfather was a chef, Syd himself is no slacker in the kitchen and son-in-law Chris Feist’s mother Rosa Corrales-Feist “is a fabulous cook,” so expectations culinary-wise are always high.

“When we have a dinner, we select five or six couples who don’t know each other but we feel that they can become friends,” relates Jeannie, who sets her table with pure linen from Vietnam. “From the time I married Syd, food was a big thing.” In the old days, Syd used to cook paella and barbecue so party guests could dine near the pool, but now he leaves the household menu up to Jeannie and the cook. When you’re used to being the head chef in your house, though, old habits die hard. “When you’re a career woman, there’s pressure to make good sales in ready-to-wear. At the time (24 years ago) I was doing 24,000 units a month in only four boutiques, so I had seven factories to attend to. And I’d be listening to him as to how the food had to be cooked. So I said, Syd, I’d prefer to be a great mother than a fantastic party hostess.”

Upstairs in the master bedroom, which the couple graciously opens to us, is another Chinese coromandel, this time used as a headboard. Unlike the one in the living room, this coromandel is a hundred-year-old  antique — another telling sign of character. “My friends and relationships of 30, 50 years ago still mean a lot to me,” Jeannie admits. “And I was asking myself why I haven’t changed my furniture. I think it’s because I’ve gotten to love it. Sometimes when you buy a new pair of shoes — I could buy 30 pairs of shoes — but sometimes you have these three pairs of shoes you’ve had for 20 years, and you really prefer them. You know?”

While the architect of the house was Manny Viola, Jeannie’s friend Palmen Elizalde helped her with the interiors: “She’ll be shocked that I still have the upholstery and linens that she got before.”

Books are scattered everywhere, even on the floor, and the selection is eclectic: from The Devil Wears Prada to Eat, Pray, Love to Guru Mayi’s Reflecting the Light. “I learned how to center myself through the Siddha Yoga method. I’m open to the philosophy of Buddhism and Hinduism, but as a religion, I totally embrace the Catholic Church.”

Jeannie shows me two evocative black-and-white portraits of her daughters taken by Bob Mizuno, a renowned photographer who also shot Elizabeth Taylor. It’s while looking at family photos that she tells me about her late daughter Natasha, and how her death, at the age of 27, was caused by depression six years ago. Since then, Jeannie has formed the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation, which recently linked up with the Stanford University library. In September, the foundation will be bringing in medical specialists to talk about depression.

This year, Jeannie promised herself that before her birthday in August, she was going to give away a lot of the things she’d accrued over the years. “Because I become so attached.” Furniture as well, like the sofa that Tasha recovered six years ago. “She would say, ‘Mom, I always change your cover every other year.’ And I told her, Yeah, Tash. But I guess it’s just the memory … when she’d change it, she’d get so excited and say, ‘I didn’t go over your budget!’”

Thanks to the sometimes tragic overhauls in their lives, Jeannie and Syd are now into wellness and naturopathy. Jeannie even formed, with partner Dale Flores, Global Vital Source, a company that provides natural remedies and regularly conducts organ- and system-cleansing flushes at Discovery Suites. “I’ve met a lot of doctors who are now integrating their practice with naturopath. Maybe they see that there’s something good there.”

When a doctor misdiagnosed Syd with malaria (he actually had a burst appendix), Jeannie started thinking twice about Western medicine. Her own path to holistic healing began on an ocean cruise, oddly enough. “I couldn’t imagine why I was feverish for 60 days. I was given steroids and five different medications for bronchitis, but according to the German doctor on board a Princess ocean liner cruise, it was too much.” Her immune system had collapsed. A doctor back in Manila wanted to detoxify her system; first she was given homeopath supplement medicines, all made in Germany. Then she had flushing treatment, five days each on the liver and kidneys. Later, she had lymphatic drainage to sweat out the remaining toxins. “Within a period of four and a half hours, the feverish feeling I had had was gone,” Jeannie swears.

In the mornings now, Jeannie and Syd drink two shots of raw ampalaya-malunggay, and two to three glasses of carrot-cucumber juice, all organic. She junked all their store-bought vitamins. “We get it from the juice now. We also both take colostrum, the first oil that comes out from cow’s udder. With that I never catch a cold.”

Downstairs again, we enter the family room. She points out a large lacquer painting done by a famous Vietnamese artist, and a commanding-looking chest. “This one’s very old,” Jeannie recalls. “It’s from Persia. We got that 40 years ago on our honeymoon. I think it’s copper.”

The living room, as in most Filipino homes, means a lot to Jeannie: more memories. “This is one of our favorite spots,” Jeannie says. “When my two daughters were here, we used to sit here on the sofa and watch Sex and the City. And we used to laugh our heads off.”

Many of the items on display here were collected by Syd, such as the Chinese horse painting and another one of a tiger (“They’re very expensive,” Jeannie notes). A lot of the pieces evoke memories of their yearly travels. There’s a Japanese kimono from Kyoto (“A very beautiful one, no?”), an engagement photo taken in front of a tiger, and a piano — the young Jeannie almost became a concert pianist — that Syd picked up at Carnegie Hall decades ago. “It’s so old,” she says, striking a key, “We have to have it tuned every month.”

There’s a photo taken of Tasha and Katrina in their teens, when they were modeling. And a wedding picture of Jeannie wearing a turban and backless dress. They met on a blind date 36 years ago (set up by a common American friend), and are still together.

Though surrounded with memories, Jeannie Goulbourn’s house is by no means a museum: she’s much too driven, busy in this life to allow this to happen. If she ever does renovate, Jeannie pictures herself in her dream home, close to nature and surrounded by books.

“In my old age, I want to read, and read, and read a lot of books to children.”

Visiting Jeannie’s house is itself like glancing at an open book: it could only have been written by her and Syd. Rather than being model-home-pretty, it’s a house that’s beautiful because it reflects the souls of its occupants.

“I guess it’s a lived-in house, no? It’s very lived-in,” concludes Jeannie.