At home with Daphne Oseña-Paez: An antique Filipino house for a modern family

You really can’t judge a house by its façade. Even in a street of houses built to the style of the ‘70s and ‘80s, this one stands out because it looks like a provincial house transplanted to what is now a dense city. From the outside, it seems like it’s inhabited by lolos and lolas with its wraparound capiz windows and ventanillas, its buntis grills and stone steps, and the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe by the entrance.

Everything looks old except for the red door.

When TV host Daphne Oseña-Paez married broadcast journalist Patrick Paez in 2002 and they moved into this Filipino house, the first thing she did was to paint the door red, “just to show that we’re young, and that it’s not a haunted house.”

It was never an option for them not to live in this house, which Patrick inherited from his father, architect Gregorio Paez, who built it in 1967, the third he designed for his family following Mexican and Japanese-themed houses.

“This house is our responsibility whether we like it or not,” Daphne says. “Patrick’s siblings are all in New York except for a brother who is a priest. There are so many memories here for the family. Even though it’s ours now, I have to always respect that they grew up here, that it’s his family’s heritage.”

Daphne’s first reaction upon seeing the house was that it looked like a museum or “something like Casa Manila,” because Patrick’s mom Imelda Paez liked to collect antiques — life-sized santos, butaka chairs, Dutch lamps, gaseras, galineras and other wooden furniture, ceramic figurines of elephants and ducks.

The house was so packed they had to literally walk around the furniture and the santos.

That was seven years ago, when everything was brown. Today — after two waves of renovation, the first of which included repairing the ‘60s sawali ceiling sourced from the Paezes’ farm in Nueva Ecija, and the termite-infested kitchen beams — it is a curious mix of old Filipino in the public areas, and shabby chic and upstate New York in the private rooms. And it’s child friendly, too, what with the couple’s two active daughters — Sophia, 6, and Lily, 2 — and a third child to be born next month.

As host and producer of the TV show Urban Zone, Daphne gets to feature mostly modern tropical houses, which has led her to appreciate even more that their home is so unique. Their daughter Sophia used to ask, “Mommy, why is our house like this?” because she had been to her classmates’ homes and they were nothing like theirs. “Every time we were in a hotel, she’d jump up and down on the couch, then I realized wala kaming couch! Puro galinera — all our furniture pieces were wood.”

But just last week, Sophia asked her, “Mommy, is this my house forever?” Daphne replied, “It is, but one day you will build your own beautiful house.” Sophia said, “I don’t want to. I don’t want anyone to live here except for me and my sisters ’coz I love our house.”

And she’s only six.

As Daphne walks barefoot on the wooden floors, she says, “All our relatives on both sides are proud of what we’ve done with the house.”

What they have actually done is to edit the things inside, thereby bringing out the character of each piece. Less is truly more in an antique house. With the help of designer Ito Kish, the Paezes first fixed the downstairs. They subtracted the furnishings by half: Some were put in storage, some were taken by Patrick’s siblings and shipped to their own homes in the US, and a lot were donated to the parish of Patrick’s brother. What used to be a bodega downstairs is now a family room and Patrick’s workshop of sorts where he stores his 200-plus collection of GI Joes, which incidentally the girls have started to play with as the boyfriends of their Barbies.

“When we got married we agreed that we have to have our own spaces,” says Daphne with a laugh. “And I always say the key to a happy marriage is separate bathrooms.” 

The second renovation, completed last year, was done with architect Alex Co. They needed to lighten the space both visually and literally because aside from its being monochromatic and dark, it was also overloaded with texture — raffia on wood, wood on wood, capiz on wood — and in a sea of brown, nothing really stood out.

Inspired by the cottages in upstate New York and by her sister-in-law’s house in Manhattan, Daphne painted the bedroom floors white with automotive paint. “The floors are tongue and groove, not narra, so we could paint them.”

They also added a layer of interior walls while retaining the capiz windows. The girls’ room, which used to be varnished, is now a pretty space awash in the lightest of pink but still with an antique escritoria for a desk. 

The master’s bedroom looks like it belongs in a Hamptons cottage instead of Bicutan with its white walls, stripped wooden bed, crisp white linens, white floors, and recessed lighting. The boudoir was converted into a walk-in closet because Daphne needed more space (she was living in a condo before she got married and left her Ikea-phase furniture but she did have a lot of clothes). “I was eating into everybody’s closets, including my daughters’. Patrick was like, ‘I’m so tired of your mess.’ So he built me a walk-in closet.”

Since the house was being brought up-to-date, the furniture had to follow, too. Daphne says that when the house was built in the ‘60s, it was as authentic as it could be and in the context of the times. (Patrick told her that when they were kids they would just open the windows and sleep on the ventanillas to enjoy the fresh air.)

For the first six years of their marriage, the couple did not buy a single piece of furniture. During their 2008 renovation, Daphne decided she would follow the tradition of Patrick’s father — which was to get the best and most authentic Filipino designs, but in the context of the modern times. So she chose pieces by Kenneth Cobonpue, his award-winning designs like the Yoda chair, Croissant couch, Lola chair, Manolo chair and Amaya coffee table; and a chair by Benjie Reyes made of five different kinds of wood.

“Our walls are purposely bare,” she says. “We built a layer over the capiz windows and louvers to give us a flat wall. Then when we got our walls, we were scared to put anything up, we didn’t want to commit!”

Daphne spent her growing-up years in Toronto and moved back to the Philippines only when she was assigned by her company, the Canadian Urban Institute, to help in the planning of Guimaras, a newly declared municipality in the 1990s.

She wanted to take up architecture in college until she found out she was weak in calculus, but strong in geography and urban issues, so she took up urban planning and art history instead. Her work led her to Cuba and Mexico before the Philippines.

And she wasn’t even supposed to stay. She regarded her broadcasting career as a detour from urban planning, but at the end of her year-long stint as The World Tonight’s weather girl, the show’s producer Patrick Paez found her a reason to stay — or rather he made it hard for her to go. He created the lifestyle show F  in 1999, which lasted seven years. Co-hosting the show with Angel Aquino and Cher Calvin, it was a pioneer in the lifestyle-magazine format on Channel 2.

“We were a newsroom couple,” she says. “I refused in the beginning to be involved with somebody I worked with. That’s like the kiss of death; if it doesn’t work out, how do you move on when you work together? I ended up marrying him.”

While she was vacationing in Canada in 2000, Daphne sent her video resume and got offered a job by a Canadian broadcasting network to do the six o’clock news. “I was like, what about Patrick? If I took this job, it would be goodbye Philippines.”

Now, with her show Urban Zone, Daphne feels like her careers both in urban planning and broadcasting have merged into a program that she hosts, writes, produces, and markets.

“It’s my baby,” she says.

Her other baby — aside from the eight-month-old in her belly — is her jewelry line distributed at Accessory Lab in Rockwell and through her website (daphneosenapaez.com). They’re antique and one-of-a-kind charm necklaces featuring images of well-loved saints.

Another baby is her linen collection. It’s Daphne Luxe at SM Homeworld and Daphne Oseña-Paez at Our Home produced in partnership with Linens Direct.

“I’ve always been a linen snob,” she says. “Growing up abroad, it was all about the thread count. When we got married, we registered for all the best beddings available here like Frette. I was so fanatic about the linens I would even supervise their washing, but then we have so many beds we couldn’t sustain all the designer Italian sheets.”

Then she met the people behind Linens Direct. They wanted her to endorse their products but the timing wasn’t right. Last year, when Daphne was talking to them about specific designs for her bedroom, she began sketching and then “the light bulb came on on both sides. Why don’t we come up with a Daphne line? I studied the business side of it, had my name registered and so on. And now it’s a collaboration.”

Daphne says that while the price point is a bit higher than other local brands, they’ve realized that people do recognize quality when they see it. “Each set has a duvet cover, fitted sheet and pillowcases, and you can buy the extras, all at 380 thread count. It took a lot of information campaign to educate people what thread count means and why you should have good sheets.”

Daphne jokes that she got pregnant for the third time because of the sheets. “They’re so comfortable. I always tell people, I bet you you’re going to sleep in.”

Daphne takes me to the couple’s “war room” — a study and work area for the whole family — and muses, “It’s ironic that I ended up in a Filipino house because when I was growing up in Canada, I felt so removed from the Philippines.”

Her father, Col. Delio Oseña, was the pilot of former President Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda. In the early ‘80s, he was assigned to Canada as a diplomat, then the revolution happened and his papers were “lost.” What was a temporary posting ended up an exile. “My father was not allowed to come back because he was a senior military official. It was just sad and strange that he was on the wanted list — and he was simply a pilot and a diplomat when all this heaviness happened. As a teenager it made me confused. I rejected the Philippines altogether; I didn’t have Filipino friends in Canada. But in my adult life, I ended up coming back here — and I was the only one of all my siblings who married a Filipino.”

Antique house, white sheets, white flooring, designer furniture, and santos — in this Pinoy house where young kids are growing up, Daphne continues a family tradition.