After lunch at Locsin Reunion venue, Solo again toured us around the city, this visiting the 12-bedroom Balay Negrense (Hiligaynon for “Negrense House”), one of the largest if not the largest ancestral house in the city. The first museum to be established in Negros Occidental, it was built in the Neo-Renaissance style, from 1898-1912, by Yves Gaston. Yves was the son of 19th century sugar baron Yves Leopold Germain Gaston of Lisieux (Normandy, France) and Prudencia Fernandez, a Batanguena. Yves generated wide-scale interest in commercial-scale sugar cultivation with his horno econonmico, the precursor of today’s sugar mills.
Balay Negrense |
Victor Gaston and his 12 children lived here from 1901 until Victor’s death in 1927. During World War II, the house was said to have been occupied by Japanese military officers. Later, the house became a venue for a ballet school run by one of the descendants until the early 1970s but was abandoned shortly thereafter and fell into disrepair.
The grand W-shaped staircase |
The Negros Cultural Foundation, a group of concerned Negrenses, managed to acquire, through a donation, the house from the heirs of Gaston. The structure was then repaired and furnished with period furniture and fixtures through donations from prominent individuals and, later, the Department of Tourism. This lifestyle museum was officially inaugurated on October 6, 1990.
The spacious living area |
The round table with names of Gaston descendants |
Now a showcase of Negrense art and culture, it displays antique furniture, a grand piano, Filipiniana costumes and Gaston memorabilia. The museum boasts of a grand W-shaped stairway (women used the right stairway, men the left), calado or carved panels that served as ventilators between rooms, etched window glass, fancy-grilled ventanillas (smaller windows beneath the large windows with sliding panels that can be opened to admit the wind) and sprawling gardens. Solo showed us a big round table with lists of the names of the owner’s descendants, some of them familiar names of celebrities and politicians. Some of them were my relatives.
The grand piano |
L-R: Jandy, Grace, Solo and Cheska |
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