How an Awkward Floor Plan Became a Forest-Facing Home
Singapore design studio Medium Specific employs colour, light and nature to transform an awkward layout into a beautiful home.
Unlike the cookie-cutter layouts in Singapore’s Housing and Development Board flats today, apartments built in the 1980s were given more room for experimentation. That explains this conical home in the island’s north-eastern region, which features walls set at an angle right from the entrance. But what was once a disorientating layout has been turned into a playful but clear-eyed spatial study by local design studio Medium Specific.
Rather than home in on the unusual orientation, Natalie Cheung, a partner and design director at Medium Specific, looked instead to the flat’s unobstructed views of the forest. ‘The unit opens up to this view overlooking the Serangoon River,’ she says. ‘It’s a rarity in such a densely built city.’ Such proximity to nature led the team to reconfigure the floor plan, clearing the way for significant spaces to gain visual access to the greenery. Besides opening up a bedroom for a generous communal reading nook, Cheung relocated the master bedroom to the south-eastern side of the building, giving the owners golden light and birdsong each morning.
Medium Specific’s most pivotal intervention is in an area often glossed over: the entrance foyer. A caramel-hued wall paired with terracotta ceramic tiles establishes a moment of compression before guests are met with the flat’s panoramic views. ‘To feel the vastness of something — in this case the forest — you must first experience a smallness for that sharp contrast,’ says Cheung.
Colour has been used as a visual device in every room, helping to anchor occupants within a specific zone while acting as a bridge between the home and the outside. ‘The soft powdery blues of the large-format tiles, leafy greens of the shelf and brown tones of the foyer have all been chosen to reflect the landscape outside the window,’ says Cheung. Red was chosen for the custom dining table, she explains, as it’s ‘one of the most common colours in nature’. The use of hand-stained wood treatments, which retain the natural grain, grounds the home further in its surroundings.
Beyond the threshold of an orange-tinged door with wired glass panels lie the private areas, which span the main bedroom, walk-in wardrobe, study, storeroom and bathroom. Creating that physical boundary was an intuitive move because the owners, while they love to cook and host guests, are introverted by nature. Preserving a level of privacy when visitors come over provides much-needed flexibility. The design scheme sets the mood for rest with wooden flooring, yellow curtains and atmospheric wall sconces. There are no loud gestures, but interesting details abound, such as a chequered niche at the vanity sink and a curved, mosaic-tiled wall in the shower.
Despite the home’s unique floor plan, Medium Specific has shaped a rhythmic flow, gentle like the neighbouring river. It’s the result of the team’s decision to ‘face the forest’ and then allow everything else to fall organically into place. ‘Our biggest task was to hold onto the soul of the home while building on what had already worked,’ says Cheung. ‘We didn’t want to force a layout that felt unnatural. If we were to go against the grain of the unit’s shape, whatever followed would feel stiff and awkward.’ The result is a home shaped, simply, by where the light falls and what lies beyond the window.
Text by Joseph Koh
Images by Accident
