Inside a modern barn house in Tagaytay is a colorful mid-century modern home

We wanted a very simple and modern exterior, and as you enter, I think that's where you see our personal style. We also did a lot of experiments or tried out some suppliers for the first time so that we can learn from it and then eventually apply it with our clients. And so it was a proof of concept for some of our ideas. Hello, I'm Bong. And I'm Rosie. We're from Hooray Design and Gridcore Builders, and welcome to our house. We basically designed and built this house for our own vacation home or getaway. We built this during the pandemic, so it was quite challenging due to the restrictions. We always wanted a vacation home with a modern take. So we blended those ideas together from our trips in Scandinavia and Australia. And then we saw this album cover by The National. So I guess it became part of our inspiration. And I think this house reflects everything that we love. Art, really well-designed furniture, color, and music. So this is a reflection of our personality outside of work and something that we want to pass on to our kids. Here in Tagaytay, we have a fun place where the kids can enjoy and where we can invite friends to have a good weekend. We've always been attracted to a modern approach to barn houses. And we wanted a very stark design. So we were actually exploring to use different materials. So we explored using real timber for the exterior. And we ended up using metal. This is the same material for the roofing. It's the same material for the cladding of the exterior. We designed this house during the pandemic, as I mentioned. And some of the ideas on health, safety and security, hygiene, I guess, we incorporated it. It has intelligent features like lighting control, automation. It also has solar panels for sustainability. So it can be off the grid. I think the idea here is we can stay here for weeks and it can be managed just by us. It's the right size of house that we can maintain it ourselves. We can clean it, we can do the laundry all while watching the kids. So in terms of layout, we made sure that it's an open layout that's easy, I guess, easy to manage and to maintain. So in terms of form, we were inspired by this vinyl cover. And we added elements like bricks for texture. We use real clay bricks because we wanted to have the right texture, material and character that it looks authentic. For the majority of the flooring, we use Japanese luxury vinyl tiles from Tajima for peace of maintenance, as well as safety, because it's not too hard. We worked with Pluntur for the landscape design. When you enter the house, actually when you see it from the outside, there are patterns in the gates and the metalworks, which are circles. We also like that form and we actually use it around. So it's really like using bold colors and just a unique combination of forms and items that you wouldn't think they'd go together, but they do. I think what's really interesting here in terms of the process of us bringing in things, each item has a story. Some items are vintage, some items are from our previous home. Some items are like things that we've been eyeing for so many years. So in a way, it's a collection of the things we love. Color gives a home or your life excitement and energy. I think what's important to know and something that I also relate to our clients is your love for color goes back to your childhood. What's important is like for us, it's something that makes you happy. So as long as you know the colors that really energizes you or makes you, like gives you joy and probably ignites like creativity and positivity. So those are the colors that you have to choose. So in our case, we like a lot of colors. We're very experimental in using different shades of different tones. And I think that's something that we want to push for a lot of our projects is try colors. For more insightful videos on design, subscribe to Design Will Save the World.