Sala Mayor 

At a Filipino friend’s house in London, I spotted a black-and-white photograph of an ornately styled, large house in the alcove at the top of her stairs. This was her family’s ancestral home in the central Philippine city of Iloilo. After a thought-provoking conversation, I discovered there were many more like it built in the 1920s and 30s when the local sugar industry was at its peak. It turns out that of the 23 houses I would eventually photograph, only a handful were ever seen by the public. Many of them, however, are the site of homecoming ‘journeys’ by the descendants of the people who built these residences – deciding to return from careers in Manila, or further afield, to their roots, and to reunite with their ancestral homes and the local societies. In doing so, they had variously restored and rediscovered these remarkable houses, the repositories of family stories stretching back decades.

As I started to explore Iloilo and its environs, I began to appreciate the importance of these houses to both the local communities and to the families who owned them. I was intrigued to meet the people behind the architecture, and often surprised at the diversity of these present-day custodians. Ultimately, they all had something important in common: a love for their family and their ancestral home, and a sense of pride and curatorship over their heritage and familial legacies.

Whilst editing my photographs for the book Houses that Sugar Built, I discovered this set – ‘Sala Mayor’ (the term for these houses’ main living rooms) – which I had serendipitously captured from the same perspective across several of the homes. Placed together, the series had an unexpected impact on me – their stage-like setting showcases the character of the architecture and the individual families’ uniqueness, but also I felt that the stillness of the scene was capable of evoking varying interpretations, allowing it to take on different memories and meanings for its viewers.