Houses that Sugar Built

The book – Houses that Sugar Built, An Intimate portrait of Philippines Ancestral Homes – was conceived in my co-authors house, Gina Consing McAdams. We had worked together on my Lanesborough Reimagined book. After that project completed we got together at Gina’s house in London for a celebratory dinner. There was a photograph of her ancestral family home in Iloilo in the Philippines at the top of her stairs and we just started talking about it: were there more houses like this, and what kind of styles were they? And as the conversation developed, I realised that there was quite an interesting set of houses here, but they’d never been documented. A lot of them are private homes, so nobody has even photographed them. And interestingly enough, they were not known outside the Philippines either. So that felt like a possible book project.

After spending a year working up a proposal, finding potential sponsors and travelling to the Philippines in 2019 to recce some of the houses, Gina and myself started work on the project, losing a couple of years to Covid-19 before capturing most of the photos in 2022 and 2023, by which time we had secured a book deal with Oro Editions. The final trip to the Philippines was made in February 2023, with the book going into production in the run-up to the summer.

Many of the houses are still private homes and not open to the public – although some of the owners have converted their ancestral houses into museums, events spaces or restaurants, which are open to visitors. “For example, Balay ni Tana Dicang and the Bernardino Jalandoni house are both museums and open to the public; Casa A Gamboa offers bed and breakfast facilities, and also culinary event experiences, and the Gaston Ancestral House hosts private dining and offers heritage tours.

Houses that Sugar Built has been received exceptionally well both in the Philippines and internationally and Siobhan has been awarded a number of accolades to name a few;

A series of images from the book – ‘Sala Mayor’ resulted in Siobhan winning the Architectural & Design Category at the Sony World photography Awards 2024.

‘Sala Mayor’ was awarded Architectural Photographer of the year at the 2023 Prix de la Photographie PX3.

An Image from the book was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Show 2023.