After dreaming about designing my own space for ages, I finally got the opportunity last year. The 1,000 sqft penthouse apartment occupies the top two storeys of an 8-storey apartment building in Singapore.
I chose this unit because of the simple rectilinear plan with plenty of outdoor spaces (two balconies and a roof terrace), huge glass windows, and dramatic double-height spaces.
I like open and airy living, so I wanted to take advantage of the fact that every interior space in the unit has an adjoining external space. So I designed the interiors of each room to flow seamlessly from inside to outside.
Using the main room as a study, a custom plywood desk and cantilevered shelf continue seamlessly out onto the balcony, blurring the lines between interior and exterior and expanding the workspace.
The room is a double volume, with views to the garden balcony on the upper level. Full height glass sliding doors provide great ventilation for Singapore’s tropical climate, and I installed Haiku ceiling fans in every room to keep the apartment cool.
The downstairs bedroom serves as a living room and guest bedroom (with a fold out couch). Making best of the tiny room, I placed the couch against the sliding doors with one side table inside and one side table on the balcony.
Handmade reclaimed timber shelves on the other side of the room also continue straight out onto the balcony! Plants can be kept on the balcony and the room can be opened up and expanded while in use.
The main bedroom is upstairs and it’s even tinier than the rest. Since there was no room for a wardrobe, I used a custom hydraulic bed from Blafink which opens for clothes storage. The bedroom balcony is filled with plants and is a delight to have water lilies by the bedside!
Due to the small size of the apartment, I kept the material palette very restrained, treating the space as a pure white box. The space is occupied by a limited number of natural elements (timber, textiles, metal and plants) to accentuate the connections between indoor and outdoor.
A lot of the works that I did involved concealing and cleaning up the lines of the ‘white box’ to simplify the spaces and make them appear larger. One example (pictured below) is a mirrored cabinet that I constructed below the existing staircase, where there were a lot of funny kinks and angles. This provided storage for the internet router and makes the space less visually cluttered.
The staircase opens up into an airwell where the airconditioning condensers are located. The air well was quite ugly so I clad it in with a reclaimed timber and mirror screen, and filled it with plants (of course). The staircase also acts as a gallery for my artwork and a place to keep even more potted plants!
The highlight of the apartment is the roof terrace. I built a reclaimed timber unit along one side, which lines up with the adjacent airwell, with a concrete sink with storage below for gardening activities. Due to a lack of space I put the main planter on top of the sink, and planted it with wild tropical ferns and lemongrass. This provided a critical mass of plants to cool the space and create privacy without sacrificing usable area.
Along one side of the roof terrace, I filled in a kink in the wall with a lily pond, filled with fishes and water plants. This helps to cool the space even further with the thermal mass of the water.
I also created a green wall along the other wall of the roof terrace, with the bottom portion growing with wild ferns and tropical plants, and the top half mirrored to multiply the visible amount of greenery!
I also filled in another kink in the wall with a steel mesh to grow vining plants.
My home may be small and simple, but it is a natural space filled with daylight and urban greenery. It has been remarkable to watch the spaces come alive as the greenery grows into an urban jungle.
Images by Jonathan Choe
