if i married singapore...

If you were a city, what would you be?

If there is a place that best represents your ideals, your aspirations, your personality, your deepest thoughts and longings, which place would reveal your true self?

For my wife, she can only be Singapore...


Asked why, of all the places on earth she's been to would she choose Singapore, a tiny island state which was a bastion of British trade in the colonial days, her definition is simple - she loves ORDER.


Like the city, my wife is a neat and a control freak. The kind of person who color codes all her reports in post-its, who arranges CDs alphabetically and zones things in any way imaginable.

Everytime I drive through Changi Airport to the city itself, I am amazed how even the bougainvilleas on the plantboxes by the freeway look like they have been ordered by the government to exude the same shade of pinkish purple that is almost crazily the same everywhere. The streets, the subways, the signs... they are all pristinely accurate, planned and placed to a tee as if they know the answers before you even ask for directions!


An amalgam of the west and the east, the past and the present, Singapore is a city of contrasts, of parodies, of ironies, of yin and yang colliding in a beautiful frenzy.

A perfect representation of my wife. Ask her what she wants for Christmas and you'll lose your mind.



Always hot, sexy and voluptouos, but that warmth she exudes is her biggest draw...


Her personailty is as colorful as a peacock gracefully hopping on the beaches of Sentosa...

A beacon of a hundred lights, Singapore and my wife can light up a path in the darkest corners of life's chapters...

She is very cosmopolitan... a city who is moving forward in every direction and urbanizes faster than our credit card can catch. Coincidentally, shopping is also the national past time of Singapore, which is also the full time profession of my wife.

Glitzy, boisterous, flashy and opulent, Singapore snags herself like a woman who has reached a certain level of sophistication that not everyone can understand but everyone wants to become...

Ruled by rules, controlled by controls... best of all, Singapore is such a "fine" city...

the nightmare before christmas

Always, every year, I am compounded by one big nightmare and problem... designing our family Christmas card! If it's with clients, it will take me a breeze to think of a campaign or a design, whip up a shoot and voila! We have a strong pitch...

But family photos and cards are a different story.

One, it's quite a feat to handle the logistics... my wife's schedule is erratic (as well as mine!), it's a major effort (ala Mega Structures from National Geographic) thinking and doing our costumes for the shoot, and Freedom is such a tornado to be kept still for a click or two. Chocky, our labrador is also a formidable force to handle during shoots! That leaves me with only Nannie (my wife's aunt) to keep my sanity intact.


Our first christmas greeting shoot in 2005 was inspired by the turn-of-the-century sensibilities of Cambodia and it took us around the French colonial enclaves of Siem Reap - from the Raffles Gardens to the grounds of Victoria Angkor. Since I didn't have a car and a tripod at that time, our tuktuk driver was our photographer!


2006 was a rather easy shoot because we wanted everyone to be comfortable and casual... but since the temperatures here dropped as low as 9 degrees for a couple of weeks, comfortable means layering, sweaters and thick winter scarves! It was a perfect time to be playful and cool...


"The Golden Age of Travel" was our defining theme for last year's shoot... that meant rewinding ourselves back into the roaring decades of the 1930's. We bought some nice vintage leather luggage from Bali for this shoot while our clothes are an amalgam of vintage finds from around. We got Freedom's outfit from Chatuchak Market in Bangkok and I designed my wife's hat. I got my vintage bomber leather jacket from Hwang Yu - a second hand clothes shop in Makati and Faith's mink fur trim is from Don.



We did a second card last year for our clients. Our red square couch was the modern twist to this shoot... sort of an "advertisement" as well for my furniture design and interior design work! lol. Our outfits were mainly from Jasmine Boutique at the Aman shop.

Now this really gives me a headache thinking about this year's theme. To make matters worse, our friends are now expecting our greetings to be more and more elaborate year after year! I have been thinking from one end of the spectrum to another - from The Incredibles (us in superhero costumes! Too halloween, perhaps?) to full royal Khmer regalia or Filipino traditional outfits (too June 12?) or even something as crazy as an organically-themed, green shoot (too Inconvenient Truth?)... aaarrrggghhh! I'm losing my head already!

Any suggestions?

Help!