On a paseo one day, Don Valentín and his new wife saw a ruin.  The lady remarked how nice the place could be if rehabilitated.  She said the same thing when they passed it a second time.  On their third pass, a grand house already stood where the ruin was—between Gral. Solano Street and the Pasig River—and the husband declared, “Es tuya” (“It’s yours”).

This happened sometime after 1869 when Valentín Teus, 37, married the 24-year-old Teresa Ferrater, daughter of the Capitán-Generál.  Born in a little town at the foot of the Pyrenees, the boy turned 15 in 1847 and decided to try his luck in faraway Manila.

In time, Teus was able to buy a distillery in Hagonoy, Bulacán.  He later merged it with Ynchausti y Cia. (ship owner, chandler and rope manufacturer) that survives as Tanduay Distillery, Inc.  He was also Alcalde Primero del Ayuntamiento de Manila (City Council) in 1871 and in the following year was awarded by King Amadeo I the honor Comendador de Isabel la Católica.

The Teuses had a son, also named Valentín.  The family would travel to Spain every five years, where they would remain an entire year.  It was on one of those three-month voyages that the boy died and was interred at sea.  The devastated couple commissioned a life-sized portrait of the boy that stood on an easel beside their bed.

Doña Teresa passed away in 1892 and two years later, Don Valentín married his late wife’s niece, Dolores.  The patriarch passed away in 1909 while in Spain, leaving young children—a son (again named Valentín) and two daughters. 

The girls went to Assumption Convent and to Spain for college.  The elder daughter, named Concepción, married and remained abroad.  At some point, her widowed mother and younger sister decided also to leave.  The ladies sold most of their inheritance and invested the proceeds in Madrid property.  It seems the son “was a disaster and lost most of the family fortune playing poker.”  His wife left him and he ended up in a lodge built against the ancestral manse’s front fence.  (A friend tells me he used to play pelota at Casino Español and swore a lot.)

Concepción occasionally brought her children to Manila.  They would stay in the old home and one of them, a daughter now 89, remembers fishing from upstairs windows overlooking the Pasig, bicycling in the sala and wide central corridor, 17 servants, tinola dinners, washing taken away by boat, how her grandmother Dolores brought a cow aboard a ship from Barcelona for her children’s fresh milk.

In the 1970s, the family sold the house to then First Lady Imelda Marcos.  She demolished Valentín’s lodge, enlarged the sala, installed bathrooms, made guest suites of ground floor bodegas, brought in art and antiques.  State visitors and Marcos friends (like Cristina Ford and Doris Duke) stayed there.

Last month, three of Don Valentin’s descendants saw the house for the first time and pronounced their great-grandfather’s surprise magnificent.

Comments are cordially invited, addressed to walalang@mb.com.ph.