A Room With A View: Sentul City home takes its cues from Santa Fe

Sun, 06/08/2008 10:06 AM  |  Home & Family

MI CASA SU CASA: (JP/Prodita Sabarini)(JP/Prodita Sabarini)

Every house tells a story about the owner. The Jakarta Post's Prodita Sabarini talks to former editor in chief of Suara Pembaruan daily and TV host Bondan Winarno about his inspiration and ideas for his house in Sentul City, Bogor.

How would you describe yourself? I work in communications, even though I have experience in business, which I entered to fulfill my children's wish to study in the U.S. With my salary as a journalist, I could never have afforded to send my children overseas.

I worked in the U.S, while my children studied in junior and senior high school. I returned to Indonesia when my children entered university. Before I retired I worked as a journalist and now I work as a TV presenter for a culinary show, which is also about communication.

I don't have hobbies that are too distinctive. I like to travel the world, learning about other cultures and architecture. I also like to taste food from different places.

My interest in food comes from my instinct as a journalist. I always want to know things and have professional curiosity and professional skepticism. I have a skilled palate from my scouts training, which is part of the basic training for intelligence which involves remembering things through our five senses, including our taste buds.

Can you tell me about the history of this house? I always wanted to retire early and move away from Jakarta. Entering 1998 -- I turned 50 in the year 2000 -- I started to look for places to move. We considered Bali and Solo at first. But in the end, we decided to move not too far away from Jakarta, so we chose Bogor.

EL ESTANTE: (JP/Prodita Sabarini)

We bought the land in 1998, during the monetary crisis. There was a lot of economic uncertainty, so we decided to put our money into this land. I literally bought this land with cash.

I considered buying three wooden Javanese houses for our retirement home, but my wife wanted to build a house in a Santa Fe style. So, I traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1999. I stayed four nights in four different hotels to get the feel of Santa Fe architecture and interior design.

I built a mockup of our house and was introduced by a friend to an architect, Yanti Notonegoro, who helped us draw up the designs.

I started on the path to retirement in early 2004, and had begun building the house a year earlier.

We finished the house in time and within our budget. We owe that to the supervisor and to the construction workers.

Where did the Santa Fe inspiration come from? My family and I lived for a period in Los Angeles, where a lot of houses are built in the Santa Fe style. There is one beautiful library at San Juan Capistrano, which was one-and-a-half hours' drive from our house. I use to go there during the weekend just to read or listen to music.

What are the characteristics of Santa Fe-style architecture? It's rustic. We will never see marble or something smooth and shiny. The surfaces in the house are usually rough.

The layout is not complicated. It's spacious, which is one of Santa Fe's signatures. The houses are usually really big and spacious. It also follows the contour of the land. If the land inclines, than the house structure will follow it.

The walls are also thick and sturdy. This house is very strong and never cracks, not even from an earthquake.

What are the benefits of living outside the city? We can avoid traffic jams. The air is fresher. In this area at any given time the temperature is always three degrees lower than Jakarta. It's cooler.

I also believe that people like me who don't have much business in Jakarta have no need to live there. Let people of a productive age live there. Other people should step aside. Jakarta suffers the burden of too many people.

MI COCINA SU COCINA: (JP/Prodita Sabarani)

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