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Architects: JL Architects, LST Architects, Spatial Anatomy
- Area: 836 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Fabian Ong
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Manufacturers: Grespania
Vision - The House of Mdm SC showcases the perfect blend of functionality, sustainability, and modern design, fully encapsulating the concept of ‘new urban kampong’. Having grown up in the 1960s, the client had reminisced about Singapore’s old kampongs where sights of attap houses amidst luxuriant foliage were commonplace. This ‘house in nature’ is also in line with Singapore’s broad vision of ‘a city in nature and taps into the house’s location near the country’s central nature reserve. In addition, with only about 10% of Singapore’s residential property being landed, the client wanted a house that exploits all the potential of landed living that cannot be achieved with condominium living. The vision for this house is to typologically recast a socially and environmentally connected mode of living while creatively fulfilling the pragmatic needs of the client’s family and guests. The final product is a house that embraces land living on four stories, creating exceptional value on a small plot of land with challenging features.
Site - One of these challenges was that the house sits on a small trapezoidal plot of land nestled in a quiet but dense residential neighborhood located between two nature reserves in Singapore. The irregularly shaped site, which also had an unevenly sloping profile, was deftly manipulated to produce a semi-basement and to raise the height of the first floor. This allowed the house to vary sectionally using mezzanine levels to choreograph a series of spaces with differentiated natural-light exposures according to the levels of privacy needed. Privacy in Singapore’s landed property is an issue as the distance from the side walls of one house to that of the next house is typically 4m. To maximize the amount of light and air in the house without neighbors being able to investigate the interior at close proximity, custom-designed perforated screen panels wrap around the private areas of the house. During the day, the perforated screens ensure that the interior spaces cannot be seen from the outside, while simultaneously providing those inside with a view of the exterior as if they were looking through a lacy veil. At night, the perforated screens make the house glow like a beautiful lantern. By overcoming the constraints of the site’s profile, the project was able to tap into the other merits of the site – sweeping views of its surrounding, abundance of natural light, access to wind flow, and serenading by birds. Rain and pests are kept at bay through a pioneering system of windowless insect screens and automated blinds that was developed through intensive consultation with suppliers. These protective but permeable facade screens sculpturally unify the compound from the exterior while allowing light and air to freely enter its interior.
Space + Nature - The virtue of living sensitively with nature is manifested through the project’s open-plan design that conditions space using landscaping. The labyrinthian greenery threads through the entire house in different scales and formats – from the indoor and outdoor gardens that provide the base for fruit trees, ferns, and other plants, to the planting beds and mini-Zen gardens that punctuate every bedroom and its ensuite bathroom. The outdoor gardens, with their see-through boundary fences, ‘cascades’ from the highest floor down to the external footpath, ‘spilling’ greenery out of the house and creating an unexpected but welcomed oasis of nature to passersby. The pervasive presence of plants necessitates the deliberate introduction of light into the interior of the house, achieved through thoughtfully positioned skylights, high clerestories, and full-height glass windows. Interior areas are defined not through opaque separations but carefully situated elements, so that all spaces visibly interrelate, producing a dynamic array of transitional moments from public to private, day to night, that coalesce into a connected whole.
Due to the trapezoidal shape of the site, living spaces were organized as rectilinear functional zones arranged around a triangular circulation core. The sense of the expansiveness of landed living is evident on every floor, with the interior of every floor interacting with its exterior and with nature in general. This interaction with nature permeates through all levels of the house as a coherent theme. Looking from anywhere in the house, there is always an omnipresent view of nature, from a multi-tiered garden that delightfully winds around the exterior to the triangular vertical circulation core in the interior that has, on one side, a vast vertical wall spanning all levels of the house, serving as the ideal backdrop for the family’s extensive collection of artworks by emerging Southeast Asian artists.
The pervasiveness of nature is immediately apparent as one approaches the house. After passing through an EV charging car porch that also doubles as a 1⁄4 size basketball court, one enters the house from the main door in the basement to be greeted by the sight of a narrow garden that stretches the full depth of the house. The lush linear garden rises as one moves towards the back of the house following the upwards slope of the land and culminates in a small open-air space with big ferns and concrete steps reminiscent of a mini-Zen Garden. Opposite the linear garden is a high-ceiling workspace-studio-library complex that can be converted into a startup office. Four work cubicles serve as the family’s ‘office’, while the lounge area, hosting a smart TV in front of a three-seater sofa and a table-tennis-sized table, can be used for work presentations and discussions. A library loft, enclosing shelves of collections built up across generations hovers above the office space, and offers personal respite. This workspace-studio-library complex was particularly useful when work-from-home was strictly enforced during lockdowns in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic – an example of how this house was able to adapt to the lifestyles of its residents.
Progressing upwards, each floor can be accessed either by the staircase along the party wall or a lift. On the first floor, a piano-and-violin corner flows seamlessly into a sprawling living and dining area that continues into the front garden and connects back to the rear garden via an elevated lightweight path passing by a guest room. A Silver Trumpet Tree thrives in the front garden, while blue peas, papayas, bananas, and other miscellaneous vegetables grow in the back garden. The second floor, where the family quarter resides, is similarly bordered by a front garden, where a Yellow Cow Wood tree grows, and a back garden, and has its own island dining table adjoining a cozy living center. On the third floor, there is a gym, barbecue pit, a jacuzzi, and a small but productive herb garden cultivating rosemary, mints, lady’s fingers, and other plants that supplement food for the kitchen.
On each floor, every ensuite bathroom is a mini-Zen garden in its own right. A centerpiece WC is angled to face a hanging artwork. A customized shelf carrying an entablature of greenery coronates the WC and stores a reserve of toilet rolls at the bottom of the shelf. Shower curtains run freely on circular tracks, closing to form ‘living’ Zen lanterns that are surrounded by plants growing on the floor all around the shower area. The Zen theme is further accentuated by a rectangular planter of floor-height greenery and black metal racks for towels and clothes on the walls that provide functional ‘art’. Gardens and planters are fitted with a semi-auto-irrigation system that can adjust the amount of watering by using a smartphone app. To ensure that plants at all levels get adequate sunlight, besides the strategic use of grow lighting in some areas, the open stairwell that links the ground floor through the rooftop lets in natural light and allows for unobstructed views of all the indoor and outdoor gardens from anywhere in the house. These four stories come together to compose a family home that celebrates the life and the nurturing of life’s interests, grounded by the presence of living greenery. Such a unique project would not have been realized if not for the active and personal collaboration among Kimen – the developer, the owner, architects, interior designers, builders, and other partners.
