A Home With Room to Grow

In Singapore, Studio iF’s renovation of this terrace house retains the character and spirit of the original home, with new interventions intended to foster a sense of relaxed joie de vivre. Here iF founder Gwen Tan, co-founder of Formwerkz Architects, tells us more

Design Anthology: How did you first meet the client?

Gwen Tan: We met the wife when we worked on a design event together in 2014. We had great chemistry from our first meeting and realised that we worked really well together. After that first collaboration, we worked with them on other projects for their business and their first home.

Can you tell us about them and their lifestyle?

The clients love travelling but also enjoy spending quality time at home with close family and friends. They’re strong advocates for the products they own and only pick brands of the highest quality for their home. After living in their first home for some time, they decided to start a family and thus wanted to move into a bigger house with more outdoor space. 

What was the brief to you for the project?

The clients fell in love with the spirit of house — its curved geometric interiors, red brickwork, quaint back gardens and surrounding houses. They wanted their new home to take cues from the aesthetics of the 1970s, and to capture the charming and quaint qualities of the back gardens and the houses behind it. To preserve that connection, we brought the living spaces closer to it, connecting indoors and the outdoors.

What’s unique about the building and the location?

The 324-square-metre house is part of a cluster of four red-brick houses originally designed by an architect for himself and his extended family. We focused on bringing the house’s design back to its original state with a refreshed palette of materials. 

How did you approach the project — what design references did you try to incorporate into the space?

Using the original house as a starting point, we used a controlled palette of black and white with accented red brick tones. While preserving some of the original architectural curvatures in the interior and exterior, we created an interesting dialogue through the exploration of concave curves in the dining room. 

We built a single-storey extension to maximise the rear gardens and designed it to be a sunroom with a wall-to-wall framed glass view of the gardens.

The clients also wanted to bring furniture from their first home into their new one, so we worked with them to select new pieces that would pair well with their existing ones. The result is a mix of modern classics and contemporary pieces that gives the home more depth and a timeless character. 

Which of the elements are custom designed? 

The divider between the living and dining room was customised to conceal a waste pipe, provide additional storage space and serve as a point of reference for the space. From the living space, the dining room and gardens are perfectly framed by the divider’s opening and vice versa, creating a layered experience of the space. 

 We also customised the TV console in the master bedroom in a way that celebrates the diverse material representations of laminates, usually used in place of natural materials (the wife is the second-generation head of the family’s laminates business). Each of the legs on the console bench is shaped in an iconic form that represents a natural material. 

Do you have a favourite element or design detail in the architecture or interiors?

We enjoyed designing the dining room and the dry kitchen the most. The dining room has many poetic and sculptural qualities brought through in the fine detailing and play of materials and light. For the dry kitchen, we echoed the colour of the red brick with terracotta-hued tiles, which blend in with rest of the home’s palette.

We also enjoy the sense of spaciousness of the house, which gives it a luxurious living quality. The voids were nicely balanced across the different spaces, so that no space feels too cramped or empty. The flexible design allows the clients to shift and experiment with different furniture pieces and indoor plants, and provides plenty of room to grow.

Images / Triston Yeo