MANILA, Philippines – Architect Gil Coscolluela starts and ends his day in Greenbelt; on a weekday morning, it’s coffee at Starbucks, on a Sunday night it’s a movie with his wife Christine. Banker Gary Legarda entertains his business colleagues in any of the various restaurants in Greenbelt 5, while retailer Jay Cu-Unjieng shops at the sports stores at Greenbelt 3. Homemaker Odette Pumaren likes to have leisurely lunches with her girlfriends, while teenager Frances Tanchanco watches the foreign bands perform at Greenbelt 3. And Kai Lim takes her one-year-old daughter shoe shopping at the Kids Zone in Greenbelt 5.
For these personalities, the Greenbelt has everything they need for every part of their lives and things to do with whomever they are spending those moments with. With the opening of the latest brands and restaurants in Greenbelt 5, Greenbelt now offers everything for the family. Located in a 12-hectare property in the middle of Makati’s central business district, Greenbelt with its three-hectare park serving as the focal point provides the city a breathing space amid the office and residential buildings surrounding the neighborhood. Plus it has 420 shops located from Greenbelt 1 to 5 and over two thousand parking slots.
“I’m always here for lunch,” declares Odette Pumaren, wife of De La Salle basketball coach and Quezon City Councilor Franz Pumaren. Her lunch group has done the rounds of Greenbelt restaurants, from their favorite Fely J’s to Myron’s Place, Oody’s, People’s Palace and Sala Bistro.
“Greenbelt is a family activity for me,” she says. Now that it’s summer she gets to spend some weekdays at Greenbelt with Franz and their three kids — Luigi, 15, Nico, 13, and Maxine, 8 —all of them being sports buffs. Franz and Luigi play basketball, with the son already following in his dad’s footsteps as he is already on La Salle’s high school varsity team, while Nico is taking up muay thai. Odette herself goes to Gold’s Gym three times a week to work out. A favorite family activity is to visit the Nike store and choose their own stuff.
Odette says with a laugh: “I leave them there, I’ll be back in two hours. While they’re busy fitting, I do my stuff. Or sometimes after my lunch with my amigas, I stay on and have my own time here. Some peace and quiet. That’s how I de-stress.” More often than not, she finds peace shopping alone at Greenbelt 4, where she checks out the current collections at Tod’s (she loves the driving shoes and bags), Prada and Balenciaga.
When it comes to clothing, Odette, like so many women, mixes her brands. She goes from Zara to Adora to Massimo Dutti. She also loves the Filipino Zone — a section of local fashion and accessories designers put together for the first time in a mall setting.
“I go to Arnel Papa, Bonne Bouche, and Myth,” she says.
Christine Coscolluela also loves that women today can have all these designers to choose from under one roof — no more going from one atelier to another in different cities of Metro Manila. “I like going to Myth, where I get Randy Ortiz’s line because he produces only a few of each design, so when you go to a party, you’re confident that the chances of bumping into someone wearing the same thing is not that high.”
Garden In The City
Christine and Gil Coscolluela just got married three months ago — a romantic island wed-ding in Boracay — and Ortiz designed Christine’s gown and the wedding entourage’s. She works for a content provider for the telco industry, while he is an architect who works with his dad, architect Willy Coscolluela.
Says Christine, “When we were deciding where we were going to live, especially since we’re going to start a family soon, we said, ‘Baka naman when we have kids it’s nicer to live in a house where you can have a garden and all that. Right now we live in a condo, but we said it’s okay, there’s a big beautiful garden that’s two blocks away, so if we need to take our kids for a stroll it’s right there. We like to walk lang going here. The weather is hot but in the afternoon it’s very pleasant to walk. We’re also lucky that on our street there’s an overpass walkway connected to Greenbelt and if it’s just a drizzle we can run for it.”
“What Greenbelt has done to the surrounding condos is that it’s brought condo living to a different level,” says Gil, who has seen how this part of Makati has changed in the last 20 years, having grown up here and now working just two blocks away on Perea St. “The beauty of Greenbelt is that it was able to preserve and work around the landscaping of the place and the mall complements the existing greenery in that sense. You don’t exactly feel like you’re in a mall at times, which is a nice experience. Greenbelt does feel like a neighborhood place. It makes eating out and shopping more intimate.”
Greenbelt has about six theme gardens in its three-hectare park, including the Tropical Garden and Orchid Garden, and a lagoon in the middle. Around the area are 18 species of palm trees, such as royal pal, date palm, Manila Palm, triangle palm, and foxtail palm; and 29 species of trees including acacia, butterfly tree, fire tree, ponytail, sampaloc, champaca, gmelina, red ficus, and several species of fig.
Kai Lim, wife of Suyen Corp. VP for product development Bryan Lim, notes that the park gives Greenbelt a sense of space that’s not found in other commercial centers.
“This is one of the best places to take our daughter Yumi because the crowd is not so heavy especially on a weekend,” Kai says. “As a mommy, sometimes you get nervous when there are a lot of people, but even when she was a baby, we would take her here on her stroller.” Sometimes while Bryan is doing his store rounds of Suyen stores — labels such as Celio, Fox, Bench, Aldo and Charles & Keith — I get to browse the stores.”
On the other side of Greenbelt 5, the lagoon at Greenbelt 3 has got to be one of the best places for Frances Tanchanco because this is where the foreign bands perform. Every so often, Greenbelt brings in foreign acts that cater to different markets — for teenagers and up. Sixteen-year-old Frances is very much into music, with more than 3,000 songs on her iPod and she makes sure she attends the concerts with her friends.
“I like Jack’s Mannequin, Second Hand Serenade, Boys Like Girls, and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus,” says the Grade 9 student at the International School.
Now with Time Zone at both Greenbelt 1 and 5 (in the latter as part of the Teen Zone), they have more places to go and things to do.
Home Sweet Home
One of the most exciting things to shop for is the home. When businessman and runner Jay Cu-Unjieng finished renovating his apartment in Greenhills, he decided that he would get the best brand for his audio needs. So he went to Bang & Olufsen at Greenbelt 5. “I wanted to put a really nice sound system. I didn’t need something huge because my apartment is small and I bought a nice B&O CD player. There was a choice of colors — silver, black or gold. I said, why not gold even if it’s the flashiest color of all? I love it. I use it every night. It’s so pretty to look at.”
Jay recently bought the women’s clothing boutique Mosaic, which he plans to reinvent and relaunch soon. “That’s a new venture for me, but retail is what I’ve always wanted to do. When I had the opportunity to buy the label, I took it because it was a dream come true for me. I’m at a time in my life when I can do it. Mosaic initially was a very casual line, a place you went to for a top to pair with your jeans but I want to make it a little more…well, my taste is American sportswear. It’s easy but a little bit dressed up.”
When he was talking with his architect, Jay says he thought of a house that would be very eclectic, where he could put the things his parents gave him and his own stuff. “A mix of so many different things and not very design-y because I don’t know how to do it. I need things to be functional. I need a space that I would use in its entirety. Some people build spaces and they never use it; they have a beautiful living room, but how many times do they actually set foot in it? I put my TV in my bedroom and my B&O sound system in the living room where I actually like to work.”
For accessories and home ware “that are not terribly fragile-looking,” he went to Borders, +632 and Adora.
Kai and Bryan Lim, married just two years ago, also find Powerbooks very useful now that they are accessorizing their newly renovated home. “We buy design books to give us inspiration in fixing our house. “We used to live with my in-laws, then they had the house connected to theirs renovated.” She adds with a laugh, “We’re Chinese, we’re superstitious. A date was chosen for us to move in and when we did we had only a few pieces muna. So we decided to take our time furnishing it. We don’t want to settle for things for the sake of filling up the house, so we shopped for accessories in Dimensione and we’re taking our time.”
Newlyweds Gil and Christine also turned to Greenbelt when they were building their home. Christine says that with her husband being an architect, she defers to him when it comes to choosing the pieces. “I always joke that it’s his house, I just moved in. But seriously, he presents me with options and tells me what he prefers and we decide.”
Gil is particularly fond of the store Sason Shop, a home boutique with its export manufacturing based in Bacolod. “Sason has very good, artistic, one-of-a-kind pieces. It’s good they’re here now. In the furniture industry there are a lot of manufacturers, based in Cebu or Manila, that you used to see only in the shows and never in their own retail stores. Now there’s a place for them in Greenbelt and they can see that there’s a viable market in the Philippines, not just abroad.”
Good Eats
For banker Gary Legarda, Greenbelt offers endless possibilities to take his clients to. Gary works for the Development Bank of Singapore and counts corporations among his biggest clients. Naturally, he has to take out to lunch or dinner his clients, among them visiting foreigners.
At Greenbelt, he’s been spoilt for choice. And he’s tried almost all the restaurants. “Greenbelt 5 is my favorite because there are so many restaurants to choose from,” he says. “When my foreign colleagues want to eat Filipino food, I take them to Fely J’s, where the adobo is always a hit. When they want steak, I take them to Myron’s Place. When I get to follow what I want, which is Japanese cuisine, I go to Kai.”
One time, Gary and his Singaporean colleagues were walking around Greenbelt 5 after dinner and one of his guests looked around and commented, “‘It seems there is no crisis in the Philippines.’ It was a Tuesday night and the place was full. It was nice to hear him say that. I said, ‘In fact, any night you go to Greenbelt, the restaurants are full.’ I don’t know, maybe we’re just very resilient and a naturally happy people that we go out and spend time with our friends and families, crisis or no crisis.”
Odette Pumaren is also a big fan of the restaurants here. The problem, she says, is when she’s with her whole family and everyone wants to eat at his favorite place. “We take turns deciding. Like if it’s my oldest son’s graduation and he says, ‘I want lamb,’ we do Felix, and the other one says he wants Japanese, so we do Sugi. But all of us are meat eaters and we always do Myron’s Place.”
For Kai Lim, Felix is the top choice, not only because it is owned by her in-laws, Uncle Ben Chan, Richard and Lucy Gomez, but also because she loves its GenSan dish, the spicy tuna appetizer. And since her dating days with Bryan, Chili’s has been a regular stop for its fajita nachos (“about four times a week, if not to eat there, to order takeout”) — the same with the Coscolluelas.
For Jay it’s the pako salad at Fely J’s.
For Frances and her friends, it’s Fish & Co, followed by ice cream at Cold Rock. And, of course, her mom Maritel Nievera-Shani’s Thai restaurant Oody’s.
For Gary it’s the sashimi a la carte to start with at Kai.
Family Moments
Shopping may seem like a woman’s best companion, but in truth it is also a great family activity. Gary always goes to Mac Center with his 13-year-old son Miguel, “who knows more about gadgets than I do,” while his wife Michelle and daughter Miren are shopping somewhere else.
“Miguel is into computers and clothes. He’s reached that age na mahilig nang mag porma. Ang gastos! Gusto niya puro Zara na. I tell him, if it’s on sale, you buy, but not if it’s not on sale.”
Kai was so happy when she found a pair of Florsheim perfect for her baby Yumiko. “For the longest time I was having a hard time finding the right shoes for her. I finally found them at Florsheim Kids. The brand really understands what babies need; they’re not just pretty shoes but also have the right fit.” She has also been shopping a lot at Fox, and says that literally ever since Yumi was born she has been wearing the brand. She and Bryan also buy books at Greenbelt to read to her at night, like Dr. Seuss and Baby Einstein.
Parents’ malling habits change as their kids grow older. Odette says that now the kids like joining her when she’s shopping. “Now I get to ask them, do I look fat in this? And they’ll give me the most honest answer!”
But she also looks back on the days when she would just shop for her kids and she wouldn’t hear a complaint. “I can’t buy for them anymore, they want to choose for themselves.”
Frances’ mom Maritel Nievera says the same of her daughter. “I miss those days when I got to choose what she would wear.”
“All she made me wear was leggings and tops,” says Frances with a laugh. “I like eating and shopping with her. She usually buys for me when we’re already out shopping. If I ask for money she’ll only give me P200! Like I can’t even get food for P200.”
Maritel says wistfully that her daughter is growing up so fast. In fact when IS goes on its summer break next month, Frances is going to Berkley for a month-long pre-college program where she gets to live on campus and take short college courses “to have the whole experience. I chose to take up courses in marketing, advertising, and psychology.”
For the men in the group, the top favorites are Zara, Massimo Dutti and Power Mac. For the women, it is also Zara, the Filipino Zone stores, Aldo, and Adora. For Frances, Topshop and Steve Madden, too.
Jay says he likes going to Louis Vuitton for its luggage selection and accessories, also to Fred Perry and Balenciaga. Since he’s marathoner he also likes going to Nike and Adidas to get singlets and shorts to go with his Newtons.
“We always say, ‘Greenbelt is our neighborhood store,’ because we live two blocks away,” says Christine. “We hear Mass here every Sunday, either 4:30 or 6 p.m. and then we watch a movie. That’s our regular thing.”
How nice that in Makati’s concrete jungle, a green oasis has sprung up to make all these beautiful moments possible for families.