Projects

A Chinese couple in Singapore redesigned their apartment to blend tradition and modernity. They transformed the living room into a study for their sons and preserved a vintage teakwood staircase. Creative solutions enhanced the space, fostering family togetherness and showcasing the power of thoughtful design.

SPARK Architects transformed a 132 sqm, 3-bedroom apartment in a Brutalist tower in Singapore into an open, vibrant space reflecting the owner’s love for art and design. The new layout features flowing, light-filled areas with bold colors and flexible, multi-functional furniture. Large windows highlight panoramic views, while art and high-quality finishes add character and sophistication, showcasing modern elegance.

Blossom, an international Asian cuisine restaurant, is one of the many restaurants that sets foot in Marina Bay Sands Hotel, Singapore. As a 550-square-metre space, its footprint is rather miniscule compared to the vast and extensive lobby where it is located. Many restaurants in this case, whether in large hotel lobbies, shopping mall atria, food courts, or airports, are usually designed to be as open as possible. These restaurants are common to be only bounded by low partitions, which usually function to demarcate the dining space so that it does not interfere with the overall circulation.

Recently, compact design has gained much popularity as a solution to a denser and more expensive space in cities around the world. In terms of functionality, compact design boasts its spatial flexibility—being able to cover multiple needs within one space. If most compact designs are usually applied for residential buildings, the recently finished Deloitte Center for the Edge (Asia Pacific) office in Singapore explores the possibilities of this design approach for a shared space.

In the recent years, adaptive reuse has become one of the most effective approaches in keeping unoccupied buildings with historic values from being demolished. By bringing new functions and purposes, aged buildings can gain new lives and at the same time offer shared memories and perspectives to the community. Generally, adaptive reuse principle is to leave a substantial portion of the historical significance intact while adding new elements to accommodate new purposes.

Situated next to the Yishun Pond, Tzu Chi Humanistic Youth Centre is recently opened to facilitate one of the organisation’s missions to provide supplementary education for the Singapore’s young generations. As a multipurpose public building, this youth centre houses facilities such as a function hall, classrooms, studios and workshops, study rooms, F&B outlets and other congregational spaces for members and visitors to meet and interact.

Just before the Covid-19 outbreak, the development of office space had reached the point of being an open, feature-rich, flexible, and comfortable space that was believed to increase the productivity of the present-day work. Many companies providing this kind of office was deemed a perfect model of today’s corporate environment, especially when it is compared to the appalling “cubicle farm” office that thrives some decades ago.

Among its typical neighbouring houses, 73M Jalan Senang that stands on a corner land plot appears unique with its monolithic look. Designed by ipli Architects, the house is a resemblance of the simple, ubiquitous gabled-roof house icon. Instead of defining the each part of the house differently, the building displays a unified look from the bottom to the top as if the shape is carved from a massive rectangular block. From its voluminous exterior, multiple randomly placed square openings create a slight giveaway of a light and porous interior.

How does one design a well-featured and spacious hotel room in a 12.5 square metre space? While there are various approaches in designing for compact spaces to function well and still feel expansive, Yotel Singapore chooses to draw the inspiration from a plane cabin design, hence the guestrooms are referred to as the “cabins”.

Normally, within an apartment unit or a house, there should be at least an enclosed room with a door separated from the rest of the unit’s interior. In a project named after the sole owner, Alex, Spacedge Designs challenges the need of a door, even the need of a separated room in the first place. “In a space for one, there is technically no need for doors within the flat,” says William Chan of Spacedge Designs.