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In the thick of nature, one becomes attuned to subtle energies. The crescent moon curves into a celestial smile, shooting stars fall as a signal to move forward, feet in shifting sand become a pen, writing new steps, new stories. You begin to wonder &mdash; is it all a dream? Not in UNNA, a chosen home in Santa Fe, Romblon, a place so grounded in community, yet humming with the mysterious allure of eternity. Surreal but real.&nbsp;

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<h3>CALL TO ADVENTURE</h3>
 The spell, of course, didn&rsquo;t start in paradise &mdash; it began in the chaos before arrival. Grumpy from an early flight to Caticlan, I carried bags under my eyes and extra luggage, both heavier than I wanted. The monsoon showers cast a grayish tinge to everything. Humidity wasn&rsquo;t helping.
 &ldquo;We&rsquo;re definitely getting a porter for our bags,&rdquo; I told my friend, Tina, who&rsquo;s half-asleep, half-partying, bouncing her head to some beat only she could hear. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s get an Americano,&rdquo; I pleaded into her soundproof bubble.
 The whole thing was rather droll. Boracay, our entry point to Romblon, was looking swampy in the weather &mdash; a churn of sticky bodies and muddy puddles. &ldquo;This isn&rsquo;t what I imagined,&rdquo; I sighed, worried my vacation was tilting more toward Survivor than Pure Shores.
 &ldquo;Tin. Stooop. Manifest,&rdquo; the caffeine-enlightened zombie scolded.
 &ldquo;Alright, alright, alright,&rdquo; I muttered, dazed and confused, giving in like a hostage to her optimism. Instead of catastrophizing, I consoled myself with the balm of Albert Camus&rsquo; words: &ldquo;In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.&rdquo;

<h3>CROSSING THE THRESHOLD</h3>
 Forty minutes &mdash; that&rsquo;s all it took to reach UNNA from Boracay.
 The first half of our boat ride was all wind and rumble; every conversation was drowned in the noise. However, when UNNA emerged from the horizon, the sun, too, staged its slow return.
 Surprise, manifestation works. I couldn&rsquo;t believe it.
 Suddenly, birds began chirping, the water turned aquamarine, and the sky cleared to a deep blue. As we approached the coast, my good spirits made a comeback. As I stepped down, the change of scenery gripped me. UNNA was a strip of sand where no logo reigned supreme. It&rsquo;s the kind of place where labels only imposed limits, and UNNA embodied the allure of feeling limitless, borderless, undefined.
 Of course, I learned this from its founder, Vianca Soleil, who insists she never once thought of UNNA as a resort. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s less about spectacle and more about return to nature and to community. It&rsquo;s not about being impressed, but about being understood,&rdquo; she says. Hearing Vianca speak was like unspooling the thread of the island&rsquo;s mystery. A leader in linen, even her fashion moved with freedom.
 She spoke of UNNA as an environment where ideas flow as freely as the tide, a space of exchange rather than escape. &ldquo;At UNNA, the act of reading by the shore, sharing meals with neighbors, or simply watching the moonrise becomes central. I like to think people come to be reminded of life&rsquo;s simple pleasures. To feel at ease and to feel free.&rdquo;

<h3>TESTS AND ALLIES</h3>
 Sometimes the cost of freedom is solitude. To be unbothered requires detachment. In my case, it meant distance from my present life, a pause that didn&rsquo;t demand a hard stop, but a head dive into the glowing depths of possibilities. I wanted the trip to be a trail of ellipses, not exclamation points.
 The first test was silence. The absence of familiarity crashed in like waves &mdash; loud, disorienting, and impossible to ignore. UNNA is remote and doesn&rsquo;t fit into any neat category. It&rsquo;s raw but polished, monastic but social. Later, it revealed itself as a symphony of small presences.
 The silence wasn&rsquo;t blank; it was articulated in objects and arrangements. Antiques from the Cordilleras cohabit with Frank Gehry&rsquo;s Wiggle Side Chair. A library with La Solidaridad anthologies coexists with monochrome lounges reminiscent of Margiela&rsquo;s conceptual use of white. The architecture draws from Romblon&rsquo;s own textures: quarried marble, thatched cogon grass, palms, salong wood, and salvaged timbers. Built slowly, UNNA favors local craftsmanship over speed. It mirrors an art installation more than a dwelling.
 Its refusal to participate in aesthetic trends seals its charm, giving the place an air of timelessness. Against this backdrop, I found myself in the company of new friends, the space itself inviting our conversations to take root.
 We became part of the island&rsquo;s constellation: Scorpio, Sagittarius, Aries, Capricorn, Virgo &mdash; together, we formed a map of chance affinities. As I moved from one cocktail to the next, I had the pleasure of knowing Sheena, a Japanese curator from Chiang Mai; Nabina, a textile documentarian from Kerala; young artists Ace, Akari, and EJ from Manila; and Kelvin, an established menswear designer who can read auras.
 As soon as we settled into comfort, we partook in a philosophy club by the creative studio CLO (@c__l__o), known for bringing people together through art. With Vianca leading the pack, we huddled in the sand and assessed our connection with nature, revealing the fractures, the blind spots, and the areas that asked to be restored.

My eyes see a lot of connections. For some reason, I just like things in twos.

<h3>THE ORDEAL</h3>
 Our makeshift symposium deepened by the hour. On-and-off drizzles couldn&rsquo;t keep us from engaging. We circled many topics, but one truth kept resurfacing: to silence intuition is to betray both the self and the earth.
 This is why Vianca built UNNA. It&rsquo;s her way of reconnecting to her inner knowing. At first, the decision seemed ridiculous. Who buys a patch of land in the middle of nowhere online? But it felt right. &ldquo;I just fell in love with it. Seven years ago, it was very bushy. We had to develop it to really bring out its beauty, but I knew then it was a special place. I felt like I could build something here.&rdquo;
 After years of working in Dubai, she returned to the Philippines and began traveling across Asia in search of inspiration. Encounters with humble provincial towns in Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, and a stay at a French couple&rsquo;s modest Romblon home, planted the seed.
 &ldquo;I like simple things. It gives me space. It gives my mind the space to explore,&rdquo; Vianca says. This approach governs her little kingdom by the sea.
 Though she&rsquo;s an interior designer, she refrains from jargon when describing her vision. &ldquo;I don't like to use a lot of technical words because it takes a lot from the essence of things. Like nature, I follow a raw and unpremeditated approach. Surfaces are left faded and untreated. Neutral tones and salvaged wood go with the white sand, while black pieces blend with the shadows.&rdquo;
 Deconstructed intentionality is her brand of stewardship, shaping UNNA as both a sanctuary and an experiment.

<h3>THE REWARD</h3>
 While intention is a designer&rsquo;s love language, atmosphere is a sensualist&rsquo;s syntax of longing. UNNA, for all its logistical framework, also shines as an object of desire.
 During my stay, the thatched huts softened beneath white fabrics that swayed with the wind. This dance felt like an exhale from the tropical heat. In sync with the choreography, we sank languidly on couches and beds while soaking in the tones of the moment, from twilight&rsquo;s deepest blues to the velvet dark of candlelit dinners.
 We unwrapped rice from a ribbon of pandan, as if it were a thin strap of a delicate garment&mdash;proof that even the simplest gestures can carry intimacy. As the night ripened, we watched Pina (2011), a film directed by Wim Wenders about the German dancer Pina Bausch. While immersing in cinema, some sipped hot chocolate made from Malagos cacao, while others psyched themselves with a trusty gin tonic.
 Though our potions diverged, we were united by music. At midnight, Tina moonlighted as a DJ, unleashing wave after wave of electronic music. This was the crescendo &mdash; our hut transformed into a church of sensation. It&rsquo;s nothing like a rave, but it&rsquo;s a calibrated togetherness that raised our spirits.
 Everyone&rsquo;s fix was different. I&rsquo;m a sponge for euphoric drops and fades. Vianca digs industrial techno that pummels your ears and does you dirty. Ace gets a kick from the jagged edges of dream pop and shoegaze. We took different routes, but arrived at the same place.
 It was ekstasis, ecstasy in its purest form, the Ancient Greeks&rsquo; way of describing the trance of standing outside oneself, where thought dissolves into communion with others and the divine.

<h3>THE AFTERMATH</h3>
 UNNA has always been about communion with nature, and nature has always been a gateway to the divine. Infinity lies just beyond perception, and all we can do is hold the grains that slip into our hands &mdash; fleeting, fragile, but enough to remind us that transcendence often comes in fragments.
 Vianca translates these fragments into material form &mdash; a way of externalizing her inner mystic. One modality that guides her is mathematics: not as equations to solve, but as numbers that quietly steer her design. &ldquo;My eyes see a lot of connections. For some reason, I just like things in twos,&rdquo; she explains. UNNA has two-bedroom huts, two box huts, and two studio huts. &ldquo;One is totality. Two is creation. And two gives birth to three. With three, because you have an extra one, you&rsquo;re able to share. That&rsquo;s why with UNNA, I wanted to open it to others. I wanted to share it.&rdquo;
 Even the name, UNNA, is touched by this numerological rhythm. Vianca has always loved the name Anna and the idea of firsts &mdash; una in Filipino. Combined, they form a word that feels both personal and primordial: an origin made to be shared. But what makes her approach different is how she uses math not to count and hoard trivialities, but to account and uncover meaning.
 She isn&rsquo;t scared of zero either. &ldquo;I really wanted an open-plan layout with some structures having no floors and no doors. That&rsquo;s the rebellious side of me that wants to break some design rules, to try to take away as much to be able to make something new.&rdquo;These days, reduction to basics feels almost punk. It&rsquo;s also very Bauhaus. In a world that rewards exponential multiplication, UNNA would rather add and subtract.
 It&rsquo;s a simple hack, but it leaves visitors a little more sprightly, a little more renewed. Tabula rasa.

One is totality. Two is creation. And two gives birth to three. With three, because you have an extra one, you&rsquo;re able to share. That&rsquo;s why with UNNA, I wanted to open it to others. I wanted to share it.

Magical Realism: UNNA, Your Surreal Home in Romblon, Philippines

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