On November 26, 1958, fifty-one years ago today, Wili Fernandez and Doreen Gamboa were wed at the Malate Church. I have reprinted the bride's article on Wili's passing below.by Doreen Gamboa Fernandez on Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 7:04pm. After Wili passed away in 1998, Doreen remembered Wili in this essay, "
The Well-Lived Life".
Wili Fernandez, interior designer, I first met at the Cafe Indonesia of the 50s, where Toots Dila led a jazz group which drew both aficionados and all visiting musicians with an urge to jam. When Wili entered, the band would play Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady", his favorite song, or "Audrey" from the Brubeck Time album. He loved jazz, with Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington as favorites. But when he heard something not to his taste, he would plug in an earphone and listen to his portable radio.
Thus friends remember Wili not only for his prowess as an interior designer, but for having known and lived the good life.
Theater he loved, and he designed some sets for local theater groups. While in New York designing the Philippine Center, he refused to stay with all the others—not only because the Waldorf Astoria was his favorite hotel, but so he could sneak out almost nightly to watch plays. Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill he especially liked, and saw everything he could catch, sometimes twice. And musicals like "A Little Night Music" and "Sunday in the Park with George".
His zest for good food all friends remember. A true gourmet, his appreciation was intuitive, built-in, instant. In 1969 Geny Lopez asked him to write a food column for the Manila Chronicle, one that would "make readers' mouths water", because of his gastronomic experience here and abroad, some of it shared with Geny, for whom he designed ABS-CBN. "Yes'" said Wili, "I'll eat; Doreen will write." And so we did, till the paper closed after martial law.
That was my education as a food writer. While I pondered what spices flavored a dish, he knew through the tip of his tongue. When he tried couscous or bears' paws for the first time, the experience registered in his consciousness, alongside food from his Palawan childhood, and binatog a friend's mother cooked during the Japanese Occupation. He shaped me as a food writer, because the researcher in me learned about savoring through the senses, about judgments reached through intuition rather than logic.
Travel complemented all his interests—food, theater, art, music, architecture and interior design. On his first trip to New York, he gawked at the buildings, and when I said, "Para kang turista," he answered proudly, "But I am a tourist, seeing the Seagram Building for the first time!" He got a tour of the new Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center by writing to Rudolf Bing that he had come halfway around the world to see it. "Wear comfortable shoes," we were told, "this is the equivalent of a 14-storey building." Yet he considered eating fresh-caught fish at seaside on a Greek island one of his peak experiences, alongside seeing the Parthenon, and spending whole days at his favorite Museum of Modern Art.
Savoring the comforts of great hotels in London, Rome, Hong Kong, etc., was fun, but also research for his work. His enthusiasm came from understanding all that an interior designer must do: create spaces for actual people to live in, fill them with comfort and efficiency, and make them enclose beauty as well. He collected art even when he could barely afford it: the work of the young and the great. He once told Fernando Zobel: "I can't afford you; your paintings are always just beyond my budget." And the wonderful Fernando answered, "Then I'll paint one for your budget"—and did, a small one that is a cornerstone of our collection.
Wili's well-lived life was a constant search—research for his work, a hunt for beauty and its standards, a quest for significant experience. It was undoubtedly fun—sitting in an old Kyoto restaurant, with tempura served singly, like jewels; perching on a stool in a New York diner, awaiting an egg sandwich "seaboard" (to go); tasting the best Belgian chocolates (Mary's, where they are displayed like museum pieces) and best-of-season mangoes from a friend's Zambales farm.
After his death, letters remembered him in many ways. Marla Yotoko Chorengel's poem pictured him still "whirling in a dance of life ... savor[ing] the flavors of timeless time". Fides, who grew up in a room he had designed, saw "his touch and colors enliven our daily life". John, (US ambassador to Venezuela) and Nini Maisto wrote about this "wonderful and gentle man, always busy with his professional life ... always so wise in his observations and his don de gente".
Maribel Ongpin remembered how in the 1984 political upheaval he had personally made sandwiches for her Namfrel (volunteer National Free Elections volunteers). The children of Tito and Rory Lagdameo knew a side no one else did: on his lap they heard stories of Kokak, the frog in the garden, and passages from Shakespeare.
The well-lived life, he showed us, was not just being a bon vivant and enjoying himself. It was part of growth, of his commitment to Philippine design, of his gratitude for the good things with which God had blest his world.
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