The social enterprise Kawayan Collective in the southern town of Dauin is redefining the bamboo house in the Philippines.
No longer categorized as “poor man’s timber” or confined to being construction material fit only for a high-end tropical resorts, the durable bamboo design is now affordable for middle-income Filipino families.
“Our first cement-bamboo-frame house is a 130 square-meter loft with two bedrooms on the ground floor,” described US-trained Architect Ray Villanueva, who has lived in a houseboat for about nine years in Seattle, Washington with his wife Amy Ellingson, before deciding to move to Dumaguete City to settle down with their two children in 2018.
Ray says that for this BnB (bamboo and bato) house, 80 percent of which is made of treated bamboo, they used a traditional building technique known as ‘wattle and daub’, locally referred to as tambique pampango that was used during the Spanish colonial period.
He explained that in the 1800s, bamboo, timber, and plaster (cement mixed with seashells, gravel, clay and other materials) were combined to form the walls for major buildings like churches.
“Because the bamboo was encased by plaster, it was safe from deterioration from sun and rain,” said Ray, who used to teach Design in the Architecture program at Foundation University when they first came to Dumaguete in 2011. Ray Villanueva is a Filipino-American who finished his Master of Architecture from the University of Washington in 2007, and was summa cum laude in the BS Architecture program at the University of Maryland.
Ray cited that examples of bamboo buildings that used the tambique pampango technique have stood for over 200 years, withstanding the large earthquakes in South/Central America in the 90s. He noted that the fact that the older bamboo houses survived better than the modern hollow block buildings prompted several countries in South America to eventually revise their building code to include bamboo. 
For this particular Villanueva house in Dauin, Architect Ray and Amy decided to feature bamboo as the primary structural support for the roof and the walls, as well as the interior finishes and exterior decking. He said the Cement Bamboo Frame is the same process that an NGO called Base Bahay Foundation is using to promote the use of bamboo in the construction of houses around the country.
Even amidst the restrictions of the pandemic the past eight months, a crew of about 10 people skilled with bamboo, masonry, and electrical works were bent on finishing the Villanueva BnB early this month.
Amy said the 130-square meter house, including a loft and a porch, was an investment of P2.5 million (or about P19,000 per square meter). “It is especially suited for the tropical environment, built to withstand everything from typhoons to termites, but also built beautifully: open to the breeze and soaring to the sky in celebration of the traditional forms of Philippine architecture,” she said proudly of their accomplishment.
Amy pointed out that choosing to use bamboo as a construction material is about 20 percent cheaper than using concrete hollow block and steel equivalents. They were also conscious about ‘buying local’.
Ray and Amy Villanueva first launched Kawayan Collective in partnership with Base Bahay Foundation in April 2019. They had just returned to the Philippines from the US, where Amy worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ray for a Seattle-based architecture firm. As an architect, Ray loved the opportunity to design and build with bamboo. As a social entrepreneur, Amy was drawn to the mission of building better homes for all Filipinos. Together, they felt compelled to move the family back to Negros Oriental in 2018, and get involved directly.
After getting the bamboo treatment and processing facility up and running, the couple decided to put the material to test on their own home.
“The finished BnB is a showcase of the soaring potential for treated bamboo as structural timber — at a price-point for middle-income families. The house uses whole poles to frame the walls and to provide roof structure. Important details include an insulated roof and screened windows that allow for good airflow, and minimize the need for air-conditioning or daytime lighting,” Arhitect Ray explained. “The wet areas such as the kitchen and the bath use concrete slab and hollow block, to prevent deterioration,” he pointed out. “The loft is built nearly-entirely from bamboo, which is a lightweight and yet sturdy material from the floor joists to the trusses, as well as the engineered bamboo flooring and furniture,” Ray beamed.
Amy said the value chain of this undervalued local resource cannot be overemphasized. “As people begin to realize the immense strength of the bamboo as a sustainable building material, we are also supporting hundreds of others upstream who supply the bamboo — the growers/farmers, the cutters, the processors — who are able to build a livelihood from it,” Amy said. “And finally, we benefit the planet when we use the world’s only known carbon-positive building material.”
“Building the bamboo and bato house was a way for us to diversify during the pandemic,” remembers Amy. “We wanted to build a house that would be marketable, and that could also showcase all the products and possibilities for Kawayan Collective.”
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The Kawayan Collective Bamboo Treatment Facility is located in Dauin, Negros Oriental, and operates daily from Monday to Friday. Its crew of 25 people, over 30 percent of whom are women, produce over 300 construction-grade bamboo poles each week, including bamboo panels and bamboo products like furniture and housewares to maximize the whole bamboo pole, and achieve its vision of being a zero-waste facility.
