Can an Apartment be a House? — Design Anthology

Designed by L Architects, The House Apartment in Singapore is an unconventional approach to residential interior design, conceived with many of the same qualities as a freestanding home

When architect Lim Shing Hui — founder of local multidisciplinary practice L Architects — discovered that the owner of this apartment had always wanted to live in a freestanding home with a garden, she decided to explore the idea further. Located in the central part of Singapore, the ground-floor unit has a balcony that faces a common garden, and it was this outdoor access that seeded Lim’s design concept.

Working with project assistant Tse Lee Shing, Lim had the idea to remove the apartment’s false ceiling and was delighted to discover that it expanded further up to a height of four and half metres. She shaped the ceiling into a barn-like pitched form to evoke the traditional image of a house, which is now accentuated by timber rafters.

Demolishing the kitchen wall by the entrance opened up the home even more, while borrowed light from the yard on one side and the balcony on the other brightens up the deep space. The walls are either painted white or clad in light timber panels, some of which conceal storage and the guest bathroom door. Simple matte-grey tiles on the floor perpetuate the feeling of calm. ‘Because the emphasis is on the ceiling design, we kept everything else simple,’ Lim says.

A set of new rotating doors separates the living and dining rooms, facilitating different uses and according each privacy when necessary, though their perforated, gridded patterns means light, air and views permeate even when they’re closed. A bed of river stones at the base of the doors brings in the outdoor feeling, and the stones appear again at the entrance and bedroom thresholds to articulate three distinct areas, or ‘small houses’, as the architect refers to them.

Lim’s smaller-scale experiments also make an appearance: the lock on the powder room’s timber sliding door uses a traditional rotating latch mechanism common in old houses, adding to the main concept. In the master bedroom, she designed laminated plywood floating bedside tables that can be hooked on either side of the bed. Their design echoes the gridded rotating doors, and as Lim explains, ‘The perforations make the shelves look lighter and allow charging cables to extend through the back when plugged in.’

The House Apartment reflects Lim’s passion for questioning common tropes and creating unexpected narratives. ‘There’s a dichotomy between familiarity and strangeness in designing an apartment’s interior in this manner,’ she says. Designing spaces such as these help to hone the boutique studio’s skills in taking the same approach to small projects as they would with a bigger architectural project. ‘Through this home, we realised that small interventions can have the biggest impact,’ she says.

Text / Luo Jingmei