Before upcycling and recycling became buzzwords, Lolly Gomez was already at it. “I don’t like throwing away things,” she says. “I don’t like seeing things being burned if people can still make use of it.” And boy does she make use of everything: broken glass, dried twigs, mahogany leaves, pine cones, paper, corn husks, jute strings, name it. She turns them into Christmas trees and Christmas decor for her now 30-year old export business Philippine Treasures, Inc.
Gomez’s six-floor workshop can be found in Gibraltar Road in Baguio, and its showroom, previously accessible only to her bulk buyers (she supplies to Pottery Barn, Pier One, et al), has recently opened its stained glass doors to local tourists—and they can buy, too. Lanterns and ornaments. Small Christmas trees and giant trees and angel trees. Trees made out of broken glass that look like precious gems. Trees made out of seeds, out of the centers of sunflowers. Trees studded with shells. Christmas trees made from mango leaves, Ipil-ipil, kapok and cotton pods.
The way the 77-year old says it, finding treasures where people only see trash comes naturally to her. “Everywhere I go I see products,” she tells ANCX. Gomez did not have a formal training in design—she took up AB English in college. The lady doesn’t even draw. She skips the sketching part and goes straight to fashioning found materials into decorative objects. She’s always loved decorating, she says, and making things out of nothing.
Born in Bicol, Gomez moved to Baguio after she got married and has lived in the summer capital ever since. She loves it here. She lives in a house made of wood and puts up not one but three Christmas trees during the holiday season. Which is of course nothing compared to the number of trees in her office in 12 F Baltazar Street in Gibraltar. It’s a Christmas wonderland here.
And when you happen upon a row of Christmas trees standing against one of the glass windows that looks out to the Baguio sky and the city’s real pine trees—well, that’s a Christmas moment right there. Which, come to think of it, lasts all year round in this showroom of Lolly Gomez’s sparkly delights.