Lorna Tolentino: Lovely and Timeless

STAR BYTES By Butch Francisco


Lorna Tolentino

(Fourth of a series)

This is the second to the last of my series on celebrity homes and lifestyles.

A loving home ’til the end

When Rudy Fernandez was still alive, one of our favorite topics of conversation was house design. Maybe this started because we once had the same architect: Samuel Dario.

Rudy apparently believed in investing in real estate. When he was still single, he already had his own house in White Plains — and so did Lorna Tolentino, also in the same posh subdivision. Instead of just letting Lorna move to his house after they got married — or him moving to hers, he built another one in White Plains and this is where his widow and their two children, Ralph and Renz still stay almost 10 months after he passed away. (Lorna’s house they left to her mother, while Rudy passed on his White Plains property to Mark Anthony Fernandez with LT’s blessings.)

I know the Fernandez home on Fernsville very well. To the left, as you enter the main door, is the den, which is the most used part of that home, next to the bedroom, of course. Fully air-conditioned, the den used to have wall-to-wall carpeting in blue, but now has a shiny wooden floor that is easier to maintain. It is there where the couple keeps their showbiz mementoes — acting trophies they won from various award-giving bodies. But more than his own acting statuettes, Rudy treasured the most the Asian Film Festival trophy his father, director Gregorio Fernandez, won for Higit sa Lahat in 1956.

Across the den is the formal living room, which is hardly used because they entertain friends mostly in the den, especially those close to them. Then there is the dining room with the dinner table where Rudy had his place of honor as head of the house. Beside it is the covered lanai where those who cannot be accommodated anymore in the den are entertained.

Upstairs are the bedrooms and the access to get there is a staircase that is not necessarily grand like in most homes of movie stars. It is merely functional — nothing fancy.

At the back of the house is a swimming pool, a later addition. It is actually on a property that the couple had been renting in the last two decades. Rudy had always wanted to buy that lot behind them, but the owner wouldn’t sell.

Some four years ago, the couple had a renovation done on the house and I was upfront enough to ask Lorna why they had the place remodeled and yet they left the powder room in the den the way it was from the time the house was built in the mid-‘80s.

During that decade, the fashionable toilet bowls and washstands came in olive green, blue, pink, cream and even black, which leaves ugly watermarks (now everything is back to white). Theirs was in very dark brown and they didn’t bother to change it for some reason.

Immediately, the couple had the powder room in the den redone and they suffered once more through the renovation. While they were going through the inconvenience of it all (noise, clutter and all), Lorna complained to me how difficult it was to have the workers back again, but at the same time acknowledged the fact that, yes, the bathroom there had to be remodeled.

In time, the den had to be overhauled once more and transformed into a hospital room when Rudy was eventually brought home from Cardinal Santos Memorial Hospital in his dying days of summer last year. It was where he breathed his last — in the presence of his loving wife and children with whom he shared that beautiful house that was home to them for many happy years.