In the Rural Philippines, a House Unlike Anything Else on the Islands

IN THE QUIET Philippine province of Pangasinan, about three hours north of Manila, depending on the city’s often heavy traffic, there was once a small beach house — an open-air bamboo-and-mahogany pavilion with walled-off bedrooms and a thatched roof — on 50 or 60 acres of otherwise empty oceanfront land. It had been there for more than half a century, built for the entrepreneur Romana de Vera, now 92, who’s beloved throughout the country for creating Romana Peanut Brittle, a popular packaged snack. Decades ago, she and her husband, Federico de Vera Sr., would take their 10 children there on the weekends; when they arrived, the kids would fling open the car doors and immediately run into the sea. But eventually, like many family homes, the place fell into disrepair and none of the siblings, now scattered around the world, could decide what to do with it: Should they sell it, especially given that developers had started illegally building near the coast on their land? Fix it up and fight the encroachers in court? Let it crumble into the dusty terrain from which it had been erected?

Earlier this decade, one daughter who lived nearby decided she would refurbish it herself. Soon one of her expatriate brothers, Federico de Vera, a 63-year-old dealer with a gallery in Manhattan’s West Chelsea, where he sells fine handmade (and remade) jewelry amid rare objects like Venetian glass and Japanese lacquerware, decided to help her. Although he’d lived in the United States for almost four decades — he spends most of his time in a colorfully crowded house he designed inside a decommissioned train station in upstate New York — and avoided visiting the family’s beach cabin whenever he was back home, he chose to get involved not only because he was worried about his siblings’ taste but because he knew he was the only one who might best satisfy his discerning mother.

As a child, long before he started making jewelry that combines common materials like glass beads and seed pearls with precious gemstones (and is sold at the Row’s boutiques), he would sit on her bed, helping her choose which necklaces and bracelets to pair with one of her hundreds of brightly patterned dresses. “Most of the things I’ve achieved in my life are because I wanted to please her,” he says on a frigid February afternoon inside his namesake store, wishing that he were back in the humid Philippines, where he’s been traveling more regularly as his mother has aged. On one trip, after he criticized his younger sister’s early interventions within the dwelling, she told Federico (who’s the fifth child) that he should just do it all himself. “OK, but nobody else is going to get involved,” he responded. “I don’t like to do a haphazard kind of thing. If I have a project, I’m going to see it to completion.”