This two-storey detached house in Bukit Timah is a simple modern composition of boxy forms in white and admiral blue. Inside, however, the palette is more adventurous. The homeowner’s late mother – who grew up in an Art Deco-inflected tropical villa in the 1950s and had a sharp eye for design – inspired many of the furniture choices.
The family lived in England in the 1970s and early 1980s. “My mother was already buying the classics in the mid-1970s,” shared the homeowner. One of her mother’s favourites was Cassina.
Founded in 1927, the brand collaborates with famed architects and designers – and is also the sole company in the world with exclusive rights to manufacture the I Maestri Collection by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, mavericks of the Modern Movement.
Cab 412 dining chairs in red and blue circle an Asterias table from Molteni & C, while a Max Beam orange plastic side table from the Kartell–Laufen collaboration and an Aki-Biki-Canta chair from Cassina belonging to the homeowner’s mother add playful counterpoints – all set against a Statuario Fantasia marble backsplash from Italy. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
I remarked that her mother must have been something of a connoisseur, with such attuned taste back then. “Yes, she was a fashionista. She loved polka dots and stripes. She was quite a character, my mom. She studied at London School of Economics to train as a lawyer,” she said fondly. “My mother was a furniture buff. I think her love for furniture started in the 1950s with my grandfather because he had beautiful furniture in his house. Some of the pieces in this house are his.”
I asked if she, too, liked Cassina. “Love!” came the reply. “I know the workmanship of Cassina well.” The living room where we were having this conversation is filled with a chromatic selection of pieces from the brand, alongside classics from other labels and heirlooms.
The homeowner’s layered approach shows in the details – saturated blues, vintage-style accents and art on the walls, arranged to feel lived-in rather than showroom-perfect. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The homeowner, who is in her 50s, lives here with her husband and a pet hound. After living in a nearby apartment, she bought this plot before the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to build from scratch. A family friend who is an architect helped shape the home’s modern shell, guided by her clear design direction.
“I am influenced by modern art and architecture from the likes of Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus Movement, Art Deco, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris,” the homeowner shared. The latter is an avant-garde cultural landmark designed ‘inside-out’ by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, with exposed structural elements and services, and a vibrant palette driven by the building’s external circulation.
In the corridor around the stairwell, a Bernard Villemot (1911 – 1989) poster adds a graphic hit of colour – the French artist is famed for his advertising images for Bally, Perrier and Air France. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
Set on an approximately 1,000-sq-m plot, the home prioritises a generous garden. With about 611 sq m of built-up area, it is relatively modest compared to its colossal neighbours. “Friends asked me, ‘Why is this such a ‘small’ house?’ I answered that the whole point of living in a landed property is the garden. If you build a big house, then you might as well live in an apartment,” said the homeowner, who wanted outdoor space for her pet to run in.
She is fond of gardening, too, and pointed to papaya, banana, sugarcane, pandan and coconut trees in the garden, as well as dukung anak grown from her mother’s land. “We’ve got all breeds of bananas – from my mom’s garden, from my gardener, and auntie Ivy Singh-Lim of Bollywood Farms who gave me pisang kapok,” said the homeowner.
The homeowner left plenty of space on the plot for a generous garden – a lush sprawl planted with papaya, banana, sugarcane, pandan and coconut trees. (Photo: Luo Jingmei)
Upstairs, on the terrace, she gestured to a cluster of white flowers. “This is the Queen of the Night that blooms only in the evenings, and the blooming only lasts one night,” noted the plantswoman with pride.
On the architecture, she shared that her architect had to return to Malaysia during the pandemic. She and her husband completed the project with the builder. While she admits it lacks some of the finer detailing an architect might bring, it suits their lifestyle – and they are happy with it.
The living room – an open-plan space shared with the dining area and dry kitchen – sits at the rear of the house, away from the driveway. You enter via the foyer, where a red Hayama console from Cassina echoes the entrance door's colour. From here, a circulation core opens up the home, linking different parts of the house physically and visually.
In the foyer, Cassina’s Hayama console by Patricia Urquiola – inspired by the Japanese haori jacket worn over a kimono – sets a bold first impression, topped by hand-blown mirrored wall pieces by English artist Tim McFadden. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
A glass panel in the floor lets you peek into the basement, while a gap in the second-storey slab draws the eye up towards the private bedroom zone. In the corridor, a pair of picture windows offers a glimpse of the living room and the garden beyond before you step into the space proper.
Sunlight washes into the living and dining areas through full-height sliding glass doors that open onto a capacious lawn, edged by a bucolic curtain of trees and plants. The bold colours here are congruent with the homeowner’s spirited personality. They are also something of an anomaly in Singapore, where many homeowners defer to safer beiges, greys and monochromes – often without the confidence, or the colour literacy, to combine bolder hues.
Unused to this sort of intrepid colour play, I paused to take it all in. The homeowner has painted the main wall a handsome blue that echoes the exterior. Dark but not gloomy, it plays well with an orange Prive sofa from Cassina, the greenery of a potted palm, a navy De Sede sofa, and the natural tones of two 1 Fauteuil a Dossier Basculant armchairs upholstered in animal skins.
In the master bedroom, the homeowner brings in her grandfather’s old cupboards – repainted in a teal-meets-navy shade – and pairs them with a red Cassina Prive pouf for a crisp colour counterpoint. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The latter, designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in 1928, and updated by Cassina in 1965, once belonged to the homeowner's mother.
On her penchant for strong colours, the homeowner shared that she walked into W Atelier – the Singapore showroom that retails Cassina – and announced to a salesperson, “I want to buy an orange sofa, and I know exactly the shade of orange I want.” The salesperson, a little taken aback, suggested she consider using the colour on “small seats” instead.
“I said, ‘No, we do it in the big piece,’” the homeowner laughed, standing by her choice. She was “tired of browns and greys”, and wanted to avoid the “hotel suite” look that many local homeowners are wont to emulate after returning entranced from sleek, five-star stays abroad.
“I don't want my home to look like it came out of a furniture showroom, where everything is brand new. You have to mix it with the antique stuff that have the stories, and then you have a home. You don't have to have good taste; you have to have stuff that you love,” the homeowner stated matter-of-factly.
The homeowner's strong grasp of colour is evident in spaces like the foyer, where the red Hayama cabinet matches the striking scarlet shade on the front door. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
One of these beloved pieces is an antique mahjong table in the living room. Without the tiles, it looks like another statement design piece. “This was my mother’s pride and joy. It’s a very old table, made of blackwood, and more than a hundred years old,” said the homeowner. “It’s a very old piece, but it’s so modern. My mother didn’t like frilly Chinese furniture.”
Her mother treated her furniture with care even after it moved to her daughter’s home, and would follow up with: “Are you looking after my mahjong table? Is there anything on it? Don't put any weight on it,” the homeowner laughed, recalling her mother’s distress.
This love for vintage extends to the framed posters dressing the white walls around the house. “I kind of threw everything together to make it my own. I just love timeless pieces that never seem to age from one decade to another,” she remarked.
One of these is a brilliantly illustrated elephant poster behind the Prive sofa. “This is from mom, who also collected posters. It’s about a hundred years old, from a famous poster maker, Leonetto Cappiello – the father of ‘modern’ advertising on lithographs. We have quite a few of them,” the homeowner said.
In the study, carmine walls set the stage for an inherited boomerang-shaped desk once used by the homeowner’s grandfather, paired with Fritz Hansen’s Lily armchairs and a punchy green Snoopy lamp from Flos. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The admiral blue wall behind the poster also comes with a story. “This wall started out white like any other house,” said the homeowner, who shared gleefully that she had painted it in secret while her husband was out playing golf.
Her husband – who had ambled into the living room mid-conversation – mused that a contractor once asked if they were working for the police, because the house, like a police station, was all white and blue.
The same blue appears on the garden wall, too. “I wanted a blue garden wall, just to be different. We arrived at this Benedict Blue shade from Nippon Paint. We liked it, and so I used it on the inside as well,” she said.
The orange accents are just as deliberate – from the Prive sofa to a Max Beam plastic side table from a Kartell–Laufen collaboration, and an Aki-Biki-Canta armchair designed by Toshiyuki Kita for Cassina that once belonged to her mother. “I love orange, and I also love red,” she said, directing my eye across the living room to a wall of grey cabinetry with tangerine-coloured trims.
The intimate dining area between the living room and dry kitchen features more icons chosen by the homeowner – Cab 412 dining chairs designed by Mario Bellini, said to be the world’s first free-standing cowhide dining chairs when they launched in 1977, grouped around an Asterias table from Molteni & C, inspired by a cactus.
In the master bathroom, every surface is clad in Italian Statuario natural marble, its veining mirrored across the walls – softened by daylight and natural ventilation from a window above. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
While red and orange provide accents elsewhere in the house, they make a splash in the study, where the walls are painted carmine. Holding fort is a large boomerang-shaped desk – an antique. “This was one of my grandfather’s office desks,” the homeowner pointed out.
It is accompanied by two Lily armchairs from Fritz Hansen, whose original armless versions were designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen for the Danish National Bank in 1968. There is also a Snoopy lamp from Flos, designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1967 – in the punchy green version instead of the pale white one, of course.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, the homeowner has brought over her grandfather’s old standalone cupboards, but given them a coat of paint in a shade between teal and navy. Twin Utrecht armchairs designed by architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld in 1988 for Cassina anchor a corner, upholstered in Prussian Blue fabric. A cow skin rug and a red Prive pouf from Cassina echo the living room’s palette.
In the attic, the entertainment space – or “den”, as the homeowner calls it – the blue makes another appearance on the wall behind the television. A lacquered Bramante console designed by Kazuhide Takahama for Cassina brings a subtle Asian note, alongside a painting of lotus flowers by a Chinese artist that belonged to her mother.
When guests come, they play card games around a long Elisse solid American walnut table with brass tips from Italian furniture brand Ulivi, its crafted legs on full display. “I liked the legs and construction of the table – see, the edges are bevelled,” the homeowner pointed out.
In the bathrooms, antique mirrors adorn marble walls – some inherited from her mother, others her own finds. The powder room is generously clad in onyx, its earth-and-jade-coloured veins dancing across the walls, floor and countertop. When the lights beneath the panels are switched on, the sinuous lines come alive, glowing like jewels.
The homeowner pointed to an antique mirror that fits neatly into the powder room. “I was walking in Paddington in Sydney, Australia and saw this mirror,” she said.
It is one of many charming details that makes this house a home. There may be no grand architectural theatrics, but when it comes to personality, originality and beauty, this one has plenty.
Continue reading...
The family lived in England in the 1970s and early 1980s. “My mother was already buying the classics in the mid-1970s,” shared the homeowner. One of her mother’s favourites was Cassina.
Founded in 1927, the brand collaborates with famed architects and designers – and is also the sole company in the world with exclusive rights to manufacture the I Maestri Collection by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, mavericks of the Modern Movement.
Cab 412 dining chairs in red and blue circle an Asterias table from Molteni & C, while a Max Beam orange plastic side table from the Kartell–Laufen collaboration and an Aki-Biki-Canta chair from Cassina belonging to the homeowner’s mother add playful counterpoints – all set against a Statuario Fantasia marble backsplash from Italy. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
I remarked that her mother must have been something of a connoisseur, with such attuned taste back then. “Yes, she was a fashionista. She loved polka dots and stripes. She was quite a character, my mom. She studied at London School of Economics to train as a lawyer,” she said fondly. “My mother was a furniture buff. I think her love for furniture started in the 1950s with my grandfather because he had beautiful furniture in his house. Some of the pieces in this house are his.”
I asked if she, too, liked Cassina. “Love!” came the reply. “I know the workmanship of Cassina well.” The living room where we were having this conversation is filled with a chromatic selection of pieces from the brand, alongside classics from other labels and heirlooms.
The homeowner’s layered approach shows in the details – saturated blues, vintage-style accents and art on the walls, arranged to feel lived-in rather than showroom-perfect. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The homeowner, who is in her 50s, lives here with her husband and a pet hound. After living in a nearby apartment, she bought this plot before the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to build from scratch. A family friend who is an architect helped shape the home’s modern shell, guided by her clear design direction.
“I am influenced by modern art and architecture from the likes of Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus Movement, Art Deco, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris,” the homeowner shared. The latter is an avant-garde cultural landmark designed ‘inside-out’ by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, with exposed structural elements and services, and a vibrant palette driven by the building’s external circulation.
In the corridor around the stairwell, a Bernard Villemot (1911 – 1989) poster adds a graphic hit of colour – the French artist is famed for his advertising images for Bally, Perrier and Air France. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
Set on an approximately 1,000-sq-m plot, the home prioritises a generous garden. With about 611 sq m of built-up area, it is relatively modest compared to its colossal neighbours. “Friends asked me, ‘Why is this such a ‘small’ house?’ I answered that the whole point of living in a landed property is the garden. If you build a big house, then you might as well live in an apartment,” said the homeowner, who wanted outdoor space for her pet to run in.
She is fond of gardening, too, and pointed to papaya, banana, sugarcane, pandan and coconut trees in the garden, as well as dukung anak grown from her mother’s land. “We’ve got all breeds of bananas – from my mom’s garden, from my gardener, and auntie Ivy Singh-Lim of Bollywood Farms who gave me pisang kapok,” said the homeowner.
The homeowner left plenty of space on the plot for a generous garden – a lush sprawl planted with papaya, banana, sugarcane, pandan and coconut trees. (Photo: Luo Jingmei)
Upstairs, on the terrace, she gestured to a cluster of white flowers. “This is the Queen of the Night that blooms only in the evenings, and the blooming only lasts one night,” noted the plantswoman with pride.
On the architecture, she shared that her architect had to return to Malaysia during the pandemic. She and her husband completed the project with the builder. While she admits it lacks some of the finer detailing an architect might bring, it suits their lifestyle – and they are happy with it.
The living room – an open-plan space shared with the dining area and dry kitchen – sits at the rear of the house, away from the driveway. You enter via the foyer, where a red Hayama console from Cassina echoes the entrance door's colour. From here, a circulation core opens up the home, linking different parts of the house physically and visually.
In the foyer, Cassina’s Hayama console by Patricia Urquiola – inspired by the Japanese haori jacket worn over a kimono – sets a bold first impression, topped by hand-blown mirrored wall pieces by English artist Tim McFadden. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
A glass panel in the floor lets you peek into the basement, while a gap in the second-storey slab draws the eye up towards the private bedroom zone. In the corridor, a pair of picture windows offers a glimpse of the living room and the garden beyond before you step into the space proper.
Sunlight washes into the living and dining areas through full-height sliding glass doors that open onto a capacious lawn, edged by a bucolic curtain of trees and plants. The bold colours here are congruent with the homeowner’s spirited personality. They are also something of an anomaly in Singapore, where many homeowners defer to safer beiges, greys and monochromes – often without the confidence, or the colour literacy, to combine bolder hues.
Unused to this sort of intrepid colour play, I paused to take it all in. The homeowner has painted the main wall a handsome blue that echoes the exterior. Dark but not gloomy, it plays well with an orange Prive sofa from Cassina, the greenery of a potted palm, a navy De Sede sofa, and the natural tones of two 1 Fauteuil a Dossier Basculant armchairs upholstered in animal skins.
In the master bedroom, the homeowner brings in her grandfather’s old cupboards – repainted in a teal-meets-navy shade – and pairs them with a red Cassina Prive pouf for a crisp colour counterpoint. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The latter, designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in 1928, and updated by Cassina in 1965, once belonged to the homeowner's mother.
On her penchant for strong colours, the homeowner shared that she walked into W Atelier – the Singapore showroom that retails Cassina – and announced to a salesperson, “I want to buy an orange sofa, and I know exactly the shade of orange I want.” The salesperson, a little taken aback, suggested she consider using the colour on “small seats” instead.
“I said, ‘No, we do it in the big piece,’” the homeowner laughed, standing by her choice. She was “tired of browns and greys”, and wanted to avoid the “hotel suite” look that many local homeowners are wont to emulate after returning entranced from sleek, five-star stays abroad.
“I don't want my home to look like it came out of a furniture showroom, where everything is brand new. You have to mix it with the antique stuff that have the stories, and then you have a home. You don't have to have good taste; you have to have stuff that you love,” the homeowner stated matter-of-factly.
The homeowner's strong grasp of colour is evident in spaces like the foyer, where the red Hayama cabinet matches the striking scarlet shade on the front door. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
One of these beloved pieces is an antique mahjong table in the living room. Without the tiles, it looks like another statement design piece. “This was my mother’s pride and joy. It’s a very old table, made of blackwood, and more than a hundred years old,” said the homeowner. “It’s a very old piece, but it’s so modern. My mother didn’t like frilly Chinese furniture.”
Her mother treated her furniture with care even after it moved to her daughter’s home, and would follow up with: “Are you looking after my mahjong table? Is there anything on it? Don't put any weight on it,” the homeowner laughed, recalling her mother’s distress.
This love for vintage extends to the framed posters dressing the white walls around the house. “I kind of threw everything together to make it my own. I just love timeless pieces that never seem to age from one decade to another,” she remarked.
One of these is a brilliantly illustrated elephant poster behind the Prive sofa. “This is from mom, who also collected posters. It’s about a hundred years old, from a famous poster maker, Leonetto Cappiello – the father of ‘modern’ advertising on lithographs. We have quite a few of them,” the homeowner said.
In the study, carmine walls set the stage for an inherited boomerang-shaped desk once used by the homeowner’s grandfather, paired with Fritz Hansen’s Lily armchairs and a punchy green Snoopy lamp from Flos. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
The admiral blue wall behind the poster also comes with a story. “This wall started out white like any other house,” said the homeowner, who shared gleefully that she had painted it in secret while her husband was out playing golf.
Her husband – who had ambled into the living room mid-conversation – mused that a contractor once asked if they were working for the police, because the house, like a police station, was all white and blue.
The same blue appears on the garden wall, too. “I wanted a blue garden wall, just to be different. We arrived at this Benedict Blue shade from Nippon Paint. We liked it, and so I used it on the inside as well,” she said.
The orange accents are just as deliberate – from the Prive sofa to a Max Beam plastic side table from a Kartell–Laufen collaboration, and an Aki-Biki-Canta armchair designed by Toshiyuki Kita for Cassina that once belonged to her mother. “I love orange, and I also love red,” she said, directing my eye across the living room to a wall of grey cabinetry with tangerine-coloured trims.
The intimate dining area between the living room and dry kitchen features more icons chosen by the homeowner – Cab 412 dining chairs designed by Mario Bellini, said to be the world’s first free-standing cowhide dining chairs when they launched in 1977, grouped around an Asterias table from Molteni & C, inspired by a cactus.
In the master bathroom, every surface is clad in Italian Statuario natural marble, its veining mirrored across the walls – softened by daylight and natural ventilation from a window above. (Photo: Jovian Lim)
While red and orange provide accents elsewhere in the house, they make a splash in the study, where the walls are painted carmine. Holding fort is a large boomerang-shaped desk – an antique. “This was one of my grandfather’s office desks,” the homeowner pointed out.
It is accompanied by two Lily armchairs from Fritz Hansen, whose original armless versions were designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen for the Danish National Bank in 1968. There is also a Snoopy lamp from Flos, designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1967 – in the punchy green version instead of the pale white one, of course.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, the homeowner has brought over her grandfather’s old standalone cupboards, but given them a coat of paint in a shade between teal and navy. Twin Utrecht armchairs designed by architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld in 1988 for Cassina anchor a corner, upholstered in Prussian Blue fabric. A cow skin rug and a red Prive pouf from Cassina echo the living room’s palette.
In the attic, the entertainment space – or “den”, as the homeowner calls it – the blue makes another appearance on the wall behind the television. A lacquered Bramante console designed by Kazuhide Takahama for Cassina brings a subtle Asian note, alongside a painting of lotus flowers by a Chinese artist that belonged to her mother.
When guests come, they play card games around a long Elisse solid American walnut table with brass tips from Italian furniture brand Ulivi, its crafted legs on full display. “I liked the legs and construction of the table – see, the edges are bevelled,” the homeowner pointed out.
In the bathrooms, antique mirrors adorn marble walls – some inherited from her mother, others her own finds. The powder room is generously clad in onyx, its earth-and-jade-coloured veins dancing across the walls, floor and countertop. When the lights beneath the panels are switched on, the sinuous lines come alive, glowing like jewels.
The homeowner pointed to an antique mirror that fits neatly into the powder room. “I was walking in Paddington in Sydney, Australia and saw this mirror,” she said.
It is one of many charming details that makes this house a home. There may be no grand architectural theatrics, but when it comes to personality, originality and beauty, this one has plenty.
Related:
Continue reading...