John Jonas explores four Philippine house types shaped by climate and history: traditional beje kubu stilt houses with thatch roofs, Spanish-era stone beje nabato homes with large windows, American-style concrete chalets with indoor plumbing, and modern urban condos. Design choices reflect the need for ventilation and flood protection, while cultural motifs persist even in contemporary yards.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 176. What are houses like in the Philippines? Some of you know this, some of you don't. I don't talk about it a lot, but I've only been to the Philippines once. It was in 2010. I took my family there and we sat on a beach for five weeks and we. We were on vacation. I had three little kids and I flew my team in, which was six people at the time. I flew them there to the island where we were staying, and we had some team building activities. It was amazing. It was so cool to meet them. But I didn't see a lot of the Philippines. Like, I've never lived there. I have never spent time in people's homes. I have no idea, Right? So when Julia came to me with this idea of like, hey, let's talk about people's homes, her first draft of this newsletter that she wanted to write, it was like. It was. It was kind of disappointing to me because of some of the things she did talk about and some of the things she didn't talk about. And so we worked through it and what she came up with is pretty good. So let me just talk a little bit about homes in the Philippines. And this is from Julia. So I'm going to read some of this and hopefully we'll get some pictures in here for you. So the most iconic architectural style for homes in the Philippines is kind of what you would expect. They call it the beje kubu, and it's like a very natural home with, like, palm leaves on the top as the roof. And it's made of natural materials like coconut lumber and plywood and bamboo. It's often built on stilts for ventilation. Prevents animals from getting into the house. This is. So this is like a rural or a coastal area home. It's easy and cheap to build and to move. Like, you can literally pick these homes up. You get a bunch of people together and you can pick it up and move it, and people do this. Actually, when we were there, we did see this once where we're moving it away from the water, away from the ocean. Julia says it's a lot like asking your friends to move, but in this case, they're moving your whole house. So the next type of house is also kind of the kind of house that you might think of. It's a common style in the Philippines, is they call it the beje nabato. Which is a stone house. So this style became popular during the Spanish era when Spain ruled over the Philippines up until like 1896. And you'll see these in a lot of, like, heritage sites where it's old school and they're. Some of them are protected. They're usually two stories high. The first story is built mainly from stone. The second floor is built from wood. Second floor often has a lot of really wide windows that you can. That wrap around the whole house so you can open it up and it adds a lot of light and ventilation to the place. People would often add a lot of like, intricate carvings to show off their wealth to these types of houses. This was a rich person's home. And they often surround like town plazas or where the church is or. Yeah, they're like central. From wealthy people, wealthy Spaniards or Filipinos. Both of these types of homes, both the stone house and the coconut house, are suited to tropical climates, which most of the Philippines is tropical. It's right on the equator and it's hot. They both have a lot of ventilation. Stonehouse can withstand typhoons. The, the coconut house is easy to rebuild when it gets destroyed. That's why these two, they still exist today. The problem with both of these, which the Americans found out the hard way, is that they don't have indoor plumbing. And the Americans found this out the hard way when they came to the Philippines, got into these houses and found, oh, wow, yeah, there's no indoor plumbing here. So they started building chalet homes and they spelled T S A L E T Saleh. Salette maybe. I don't really know how to say that. So these are also built with. With ventilation in mind, but typical American style. They said, oh yeah, we can't build a house like that. We have to use concrete. And so they started. They introduced concrete cement as a building material and started building foundations for houses. And that's. And that persisted after the Americans left World War II. These sales have indoor plumbing. They have indoor kitchens. They have park like garages often or parking carports, which were the. All of these things were not common in the Philippines before that. These types of homes were used to house like US Soldiers or probably officers during the war. And they. Because it's so hot in the Philippines, they would often build these higher up, like in. As you head up an inactive volcano in the mountains. They would build them in cooler, cooler places. So sometimes some of these homes have fireplaces because at some times of the year they. It may get a little bit cold there. And they started hiring Filipinos to build them. So the Filipinos learned to build them, and then they kind of became the standard for houses in the Philippines thereafter. So when Julia initially wrote this email, the next, the next part of this was about their modern houses. And I looked at it and was like, that's dumb. This is boring. This is not. Like you just sent me a picture of an American house. It's just smaller. And she's like, yeah, that's all the modern houses in the Philippines. That's how we do it now. We live in townhomes. We live in, we live in condos made of concrete and steel and glass, and they're cookie cutter and they're super modern. And this is where we live. And then I've seen pictures of neighborhoods or neighborhoods where, yep, it's just a smaller house. It has bedrooms and a kitchen and bathrooms. And it's just normal. It's not special. Like, it's not a coconut thatched roof. It's a, it's a tiled roof. And that's how most. That's in most cities. That's what you're going to find. You're going to find more modern, modern things that people are living in. But culture is strong in the Philippines. And so if you're living in a modern house, they'll often find ways to integrate cultural things. Like you can buy the miniature coconut style house as like an outdoor hangout place, like a, a cabana type thing. And you put that in your yard so that you have this modern house, but you still have a throwback to the old style of the Philippines in your backyard that you can go out and look at and sit in, even though it, you know, it's just there for looks.
