She built the page
Over the years, the Property Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer became one of those rare spaces where readers returned for guidance, pleasure, and perspective.
Behind that steady voice were women whose writing brought warmth, rigor, intelligence, and grace to subjects often treated in purely practical terms. They helped Inquirer Property readers see homes as vessels of memory, land as a matter of consequence, design as an important force in daily life, and cities as reflections of the values of the people who build them.
This Women’s Month, it feels fitting to honor those women whose words gave Inquirer Property its depth and humanity. Through their columns, property emerged as a story of living, belonging, responsibility, and care.
The language of living
IDr. Tessa Prieto gave design writing a social pulse.
Through My Square Meter, which already appeared in Inquirer Property as early as 2016, she brought readers into rooms filled with texture, hospitality, ceremony, and style.
While her pieces carried the shimmer of events and launches, what endured was her instinct for atmosphere. She understood a home as a setting for personality, welcome, and memory.
Ar. Isabel Berenguer Asuncion has offered a steadier, quietly enduring design voice. Design Dimensions appears in the Inquirer archive as early as September 2011, a sign of how long she has helped readers read space with a trained eye.
Her work carries the discipline of architecture in language that stays accessible to readers. She has a gift for translating professional insight into something a homeowner, buyer, or even a curious reader can bring into daily life.
IDr. Chat Fores continues that welcoming tradition for a new moment.
Her Design Chitchat column, available in the Inquirer archive starting 2025, explores comfort, ease, and the pleasures of thoughtful interiors with an inviting spirit. She reminds readers that good design can begin with light, proportion, habit, and the simple wish to live well in one’s own space.
The women who clarified the law
Atty. Ma. Soledad Deriquito Mawis gave the section clarity with authority.
Her Property Rules pieces, present in the Inquirer by October 2017, helped readers navigate ownership, rights, disputes, and the legal realities that shape every parcel and dwelling.
Her voice carries the calm of scholarship and the discipline of practice, qualities that matter deeply in a field where confusion can cost families their peace. Public profiles identify her as Dean in the Lyceum law community, reflecting her legal leadership.
Alongside her, Atty. Sara Mae Mawis Klasen strengthened that legal service for readers with a practical, contemporary voice. Her byline is clearly visible in the Inquirer archives by 2021, offering guidance on execution sales, succession, easements, and the procedural terrain that so often overwhelms ordinary property owners.
Together, they transformed legal language into public service.
The civic imagination
Ar. Vittoria Lou Mawis Aliston writes with an architectural imagination grounded in the lives buildings shape.
Her work has consistently pointed toward sustainability, shared spaces, resilience, and communities built with people in mind. She writes as an architect who understands that design decisions ripple outward into health, dignity, mobility, and daily opportunity.
The late Prof. Grace C. Ramos brought that same sense of responsibility to the scale of the city and the environment. Writing for the Property Section from 2021, she addressed sustainability, planning, climate pressures, and the moral weight of development.
Following her passing on September 9, 2025, her body of work remains one of the section’s clearest calls for thoughtful and responsible planning. It remains urgent, rooted in care for place and people.
A page shaped by women
Taken together, these women wrote an extraordinary portrait of the real estate landscape.
They showed its beauty, defended its rights, expanded its ethics, and softened its edges with humanity. They gave readers rooms to dream in, principles to stand on, and cities to hope for.
Their legacy lives in every reader who learned to look at a home with greater feeling, a right with sharper understanding, and a city with deeper responsibility. They gave Inquirer Property pages character, conviction, and heart, and those gifts continue to shape the lives that unfold around the spaces we call our own.
