Designing From the Inside Out: Why Facilities Matter to Me

There's a version of my life where I became an architect. I thought about it seriously while I was already deep into veterinary school at UPLB, to the point where I looked into shifting to UP Diliman for architecture. My original dream, if I'm honest about it, was never a single course. It was a combination: architecture, interior design, and landscaping, three disciplines that all deal with the same underlying question, which is how you shape a space so that it works for whoever lives or moves through it. I never made that shift. I stayed in veterinary medicine, partly because I genuinely loved it too, and partly because of a promise I made to a Dalmatian named Mazz, the first dog ever gifted to me, who I lost to heatstroke back in high school. I finished the course I started. But the pull toward design never actually left. It just found other ways to show up.

Looking back, I think what draws me to space and structure isn't really about buildings themselves. It's the same instinct that made me a decent diagnostician: the pattern-seeing, the need to understand how separate pieces fit into a working whole. A building is just another system with symptoms. Bad airflow, awkward foot traffic, a layout that looks fine on paper but breaks down the moment real operations start running through it, all of that is diagnosable if you know what to look for. I never stopped looking for it, even after I put the architecture dream aside.

The clearest place that instinct kept surfacing was during my years at BAI, in the national reference laboratory for animal disease diagnosis. I went in as a diagnostician, but the role kept pulling me toward laboratory management, and management in that setting means facilities. I got trained across ISO systems, biosafety, biosecurity, facility design, workflow planning, waste disposal, and more, and each of those trainings peeled back another layer of how much a physical space determines whether a laboratory can actually do its job safely. You can have the best scientists and the best equipment, and still fail at biosafety if the building itself wasn't designed with contamination pathways in mind.

So I ended up hands-on with almost every physical dimension of that laboratory. Pest control, roofing, general repairs, expansion planning. I spent real time thinking through how to revive an old waste disposal system and a waste water treatment facility that had been neglected for years, sketching out approaches in my head for how it could work. Government funding being what it is, the budget never came through to actually execute it, so it stayed unexplored, one more thing on the list of what the facility needed but couldn't yet afford. I was involved in designing the electrical rewiring of the building, planning a solar power installation on an aging roof structure, and setting up the generator system that kept the whole facility running during outages. I managed the housing for laboratory animals, thinking through what proper husbandry space actually requires, not just what's convenient to build. I oversaw the construction of a waste storage facility, and the maintenance and repair of a crematorium and incineration system, which is not glamorous work but is absolutely essential to how a diagnostic lab operates responsibly. None of this was in my job description when I started. It became my job description because I kept noticing what needed fixing and I understood, better than most people around me, why it mattered.

By 2018 I had also become part of the national team responsible for accrediting private and government animal diagnostic laboratories, which meant regularly walking into other people's facilities and assessing whether the space itself supported what the lab was mandated to do. By 2019 I've been leading and training the next batch of younger team members to do the same. Around that period I also joined an FAO program on laboratory mapping, where the task was to assess gaps across national and regional labs, everything they needed to fully function as frontline diagnostic sites for livestock disease outbreaks, surveillance, investigation, and the broader One Health mandate connecting animal, human, and environmental health. That work sharpened something in me. I wasn't just looking at whether a lab had the right equipment. I was looking at whether the building itself, the workflow, the layout, the safety design, could support the mission it was built for.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, in 2017, one of my closest friends from college invited me to become an incorporator in a startup construction company offering design and build services. At the time I was also figuring out where to put my earnings from stock investing, so the timing worked in more ways than one. I said yes, partly for the business opportunity, but honestly, more because it gave me a front row seat to the construction and design industry I'd once wanted to formally study. I didn't have the technical design skills. What I had was strong interest and real passion, and I leaned into that, taking on a role as one of the company's directors and corporate officers. It became my weekend side hustle, the space where I learned what it actually means to own and run a business, long before I carried that knowledge into the corporate roles I hold today.

All of it points toward the same thing now. I don't design facilities in the formal, licensed, technical sense. But I understand them, deeply, from the inside out, because I've lived the operational reality of what happens when a facility is designed well and what happens when it isn't. That's exactly the lens I want to bring to future veterinary facility projects, whether that's an animal hospital or clinic, a pet cafe, pet boarding and hotel spaces, or diagnostic laboratories built the right way from the start. I've spent years fixing what other people got wrong after the fact. What I actually want now is to be in the room early enough that the fixing isn't necessary at all.