Siama Hotel in Sorsogon, Bicol in the Philippines was originally built to be a home for the children of owner and designer Milo Naval - to bring them closer to their roots. They've since opened it up to others as a hotel offering a boutique experience.
Naval's furniture designs from OMO Furniture also furnish the whole hotel, with every room styled differently. Cascading lamps of mother of pearl shells hang at a jaw-dropping scale while long communal tables of solid planks of wood allow people to make new friends. Using locally sourced wood to clad the structure, and endemic plants for the landscape, Siama Hotel makes for a beautiful stay for the discerning, design lover.
We wanted a place here in the province to bring my kids back to their roots.
They were born and grew up in Manila and I thought that I wanted a place for them,
bring them to their home province.
Hi, I'm Nilon Aval. We are now here at Shama Hotel in Tercegón.
You know, I myself grew up in a similar setting.
So I know how it is to grow up in a provincial sort of setting.
We wanted a place here in the province where we can stay and also share to our friends.
And eventually we thought, why don't we open it also to other people?
So the plan became bigger and bigger, not just the home.
Now it's sort of a place to stay in the province.
In planning, me and my wife thought of putting up a place or house
or a structure that we feel would blend here in the place.
This is like a coconut plantation.
In the beginning, we want a place or a structure that will blend with the place.
Even in the coloring, the finishes and all, and the style,
something that would fit a provincial living.
That's where we started to plan the style of the place and then everything follows.
We don't want a structure that would cost so much attention in a certain place.
So we just wanted to blend.
Designing the place started from what is here and
feel that it is a kind of living or style that we wanted for a place to stay in the province.
If you notice the building, the building itself, the structure, the materials
that we use for the screens of the building, the black screens, those are all indigenous wood.
They all come from here.
When you design something, you would like to use something that's coming from the place.
And so that's one of the things that we have plenty here, the wood.
Even the main structure, which is the building itself,
we didn't want to color the natural cement.
We want it to blend with the garden, the landscape.
We want to work with the wood and cement together,
but have a structure that's also modern enough that is acceptable in style.
We wanted that.
We wanted, we want to achieve that kind of look using what is coming from here.
Even the landscape, the materials that we use for the garden,
we have very little, we didn't touch so much what was here in the beginning.
We just added.
Everything here looks so natural.
It's something that's indigenous or endemic to the place.
Nothing fancy-looking, nothing foreign.
Everything is blended together because it's from here.
People who would come here would ask, whose house is this?
They thought it was just a house, not really a resort or a hotel.
But we have that look and that feeling.
In that way, I feel that we were able to achieve what we wanted people to feel
when they arrive here, the sense of arriving in your own home.
The furniture, we designed it for the hotel according to what we need here.
The public spaces, the common spaces, usually they're very open.
We don't use air conditioners.
We want people to feel the sun coming in from the outside going inside.
We want people to experience a little bit of the rain when it rains.
Good design for me is a design that works.
It should always answer a given problem.
You have to design according to what is here and what is needed to be designed.
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