Donning a pink wig and an even more vivid-colored ruffle skirt, 49-year-old Zamboanga-born Maria Remedios Nana, better known to her friends as Remy, recalls how her Barbie-inspired condominium in Quezon City and her Barbie-inspired dreamhouse in Zamboanga came to be.
Sitting down with Manila Standard, Remy related the dream-like experience to her childhood wishes.
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve already had a love for collecting dolls, but not particularly Barbie since at that time, I couldn’t afford Barbie dolls,” She said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Remy described building up her dream of the doll-inspired staycation as a lengthy process that only came true after more than a year, as she had many ideas inspired by the doll-collectible’s dream house.
“We would often see in the walls of the dreamhouses built in and pasted as stickers, so I decided to incorporate that in my design,” she added.
Instead of hanging real shelves on the walls, Remy chose to paste stickers of the said furniture on her walls as inspired by the two-dimensional backdrops of Barbie’s dreamhouse.
“I started collecting dolls around 2015, but as they grew and grew, I needed to find storage so I decided to put them in the house I was building in Zamboanga,” Remy said. She began construction in 2019 but was delayed when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Remedios’s doll collection boasts of a variety of Barbie collector lines from Gold to Platinum, amounting to maximum of at least P40,000 for in-box platinum Barbies.
She hopes to get her hands on the original 1959 Barbie doll which donned a black-and-white striped swimsuit
Inspired by the doll’s tagline, “You can be anything that you wanna be,” she described how she grew to love collecting the dolls for her daughter before growing to love dressing, accessorizing, and fixing the dolls herself.
“It’s important for kids to see the diversity of Barbie, especially now that the selection is very diverse – from the newest curvy barbies and career-line barbies like doctors, lawyers, judges, and chefs. You can be anything you want to be,”
Remy’s two-floor Barbie-inspired dream house in Zamboanga is in Barangay Tumaga and has yet to be opened to the public, while her dream staycation in Fairview, Quezon City costs P2500 per night.
In the near future, Nana plans to build a Barbie-inspired events place that may house her growing collection of dolls.
For more details, they may be contacted through their facebook page: Barbie Condo Staycation at Trees Residences QC.