The Guest House at The Seasons Residences, 8th Avenue corner 36th Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig: a one-storey pavilion on the amenity deck, gravel garden and stepping stones in front, towers behind. Image courtesy of The Seasons Residences.
Federal Land opened a four-bedroom guest house at The Seasons Residences in Bonifacio Global City in mid-September. The same week, it inaugurated Aki Tower, the third of four towers on the site.
The house is on the amenity deck at 8th Avenue and 36th Street, in Grand Central Park, Taguig. If you own an apartment, you can rent it when family comes through. You book it separately. Federal Land has not said what it costs.
A lot of buyers in BGC still pay for a spare bedroom that sits empty most of the year. This building is trying the other option.
What Opened
Federal Land, the Ty family's property company, built the project with Nomura Real Estate Development, a Tokyo housing group, and Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings, the department-store group behind the mall in the podium. The name on the licence is Sunshine Fort North Bonifacio Realty Development Corporation. Nikken Sekkei, the Tokyo firm, planned four towers named Haru, Natsu, Aki, and Fuyu: nearly 1,400 apartments over a 10,000-square-metre amenity deck. Fuyu is due in 2027. The whole project is listed as finished by 31 December 2027.
The Guest House looks like a small house that landed on the podium: dark roof, gravel garden, stepping stones. Inside there is a living room, a dining table under a circular window, a kitchen, and four bedrooms with their own baths. One of the bedrooms is tatami. Federal Land calls it a Japanese-style house that residents can lease for guests.
When Aki was launched in 2022, the sales desk talked about three bedrooms. This month's write-ups say four, including the tatami room. Ask the front desk which it is, and how you actually book it.
"The most unique amenity is the guest house. The guest house also takes into consideration the Filipino culture of having close family ties."
Guita Saenz-Resurreccion, then Federal Land head of sales, speaking to BusinessWorld at the Aki launch, February 2022
The September handouts reach for omotenashi, the Japanese word for careful hospitality. Guita's line from 2022 is easier. Filipino families put relatives up. They want a kitchen and a door they can shut.
Read When the Building Becomes the Country Club if you want the longer look at amenity floors sold as private clubs. The Guest House is closer to a house you reserve.
Next Door
Grand Hyatt Manila is a block south, at the top of the Metrobank Center on 35th Street, in the same park. Mitsukoshi BGC, the first Philippine branch of the Tokyo store, has been in the Seasons podium since a soft opening in November 2022 and a formal one in July 2023. If someone in the family holds a key, a visitor can buy groceries downstairs and sleep in the guest house upstairs.
Aki also opened rooms people might use on a weekday: a business center, a function room, a kitchen for cooking together, a gym, a terrace, a quiet garden. A kids' playroom, a screening room, and a golf simulator are still coming.
The apartments themselves come with the Japanese kit Federal Land has been selling since the first tower: storage that actually holds shoes, an oil-filter hood, air-washing tiles, a damper in the frame, a shower toilet. Specify the Washlet Before the Marble is about putting that hardware on the first drawing of an American house. Here it is already in the unit. What you still have to decide is where the cousins sleep.
Buy the Family Niche Before the Guest Suite is about the other room families put off. This one is for people who still get on a plane.
Who Can Book It
Only homeowners and their guests. There is no price on the website, and nothing public about how many nights you can have at Christmas or Undas, the first weekend of November when families go to the cemetery. If you are choosing between this house and a fourth bedroom of your own, ask the sales gallery what it costs right now, who cleans it, and how early a reunion weekend is gone.
If you are buying somewhere else in BGC, or in a similar compound in Singapore or Vancouver, the useful move is the shared house. Kyoto's Machiya Grammar for the Modern Household is the older version: a guest room that looks onto a garden. Why Hospitality Design Is Influencing Luxury Homes is what happens when the hotel writes the floor plan.
Mitsukoshi on 8th and 36th is the door anyone can walk through. The Guest House stays upstairs, for people who live there. Check mall hours on mitsukoshi.ph.
