Tatler Homes Design Awards 2024: See the winners of Best Adaptive Reuse

The new category was established to recognise those who expertly wield adaptive reuse as an approach to sustainability in the built industry. V-Zug is collaborating with Tatler Homes Singapore to recognise three Best Adaptive Reuse projects across diverse building typologies.

The three projects are 21 Carpenter hotel in Singapore by Woha Architects, Penang Heritage Mansion in Malaysia by RT+Q Architects, and Ola Hale Restaurant & Bar in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam by Chio Architects. 

The 21 Carpenter hotel by Woha Architects is an amalgamation of four conserved shophouses along Carpenter Street, and a newly built five-storey rear block. The four shophouses date back to 1936 and were built as the headquarters of the Chye Hua Seng Wee Kee remittance office of Lee Wee Nam, who became one of the founders of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC). The new volume has been designed to contrast with the shophouses, yet to be in a dialogue with it so that old and new inform and enhance each other.

Highlights of the design include the materials from the old shophouses, which have been incorporated into the new interior, and the new volume’s perforated aluminium skin, on which are engraved snippets taken from letters in the remittance documents sent home by illiterate Chinese migrant workers. These poetic lines were written for the workers by classically educated scribes who operated in the covered walkways of Chinatown.

In case you missed it: How Woha turns a historic remittance house into a brutalist, design-led urban hotel

“Too often the heritage building is merged into the new extension which makes a very dense, deep block with windowless rooms,” says Woha Architects co-founder Richard Hassell, who helmed the project. “Here, we kept the form of the conservation block and ‘floated’ the new block above it, allowing you to understand which is old and which is new.”

The Penang Heritage Mansion by RT+Q Architects and Malaysia-based firm SM Ooi Architect is as much of a heritage restoration project as it is an adaptive reuse project. The structure comprises an old house built in the 1900s and a new addition at the back that acts as a home office.

The original house had undergone many renovations in the last 60 years, and each time it had lost more of its intricate original design features, like its tropical louvred windows, undergoing a simplification process to accommodate updates such as indoor air-conditioning and a clean look in line with modern architectural touches.

Read more: 5 inspiring heritage homes in Penang

RT+Q Architects’ co-founder Rene Tan was given a single surviving photograph of the house as a visual reference for the abode’s latest reincarnation, which requested that the heritage building be restored as closely as possible to its original facade while accommodating the current occupants’ contemporary lifestyle.

“We’ve honoured the house’s past by restoring its original exterior character while adapting its interior to give greater flexibility for the family’s evolving needs,” shares Tan. Meanwhile, the newly erected additional volume at the rear has been built with a decidedly contemporary aesthetic, with proportions and design features that pay tribute to the old structure. 

Located on crowded Hai Ba Trung street in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the adaptive reuse project Ola Hale Restaurant & Bar by Chio Architects and local partner Baris Arch occupies the architectural shell of a multi-storey modernist house that’s been repurposed into a new destination.

Standing just across the street from the historical pink Tan Dinh church, the restaurant’s interior has been designed to reflect the venue’s identity as a Hawaiian restaurant, as well as its Vietnamese locale and its residential past. “Visiting Ola Hale is an experience of interference between Hawaiian and Vietnamese cultures,” explains Chio Wen Tian, founder and principal architect of Chio Architects.

“The experience itself is designed according to the local Vietnamese home-visiting culture, where guests are welcomed at the bar on the ground floor, gather for meals on the first floor, and then mingle at the bar, which is a cosy space with a rippling ceiling designed to represent the sound of waves,” he adds.

Features of the adaptive reuse project include woven rattan walls inspired by Vietnamese fishing tools, Bien Hoa ceramic vases, a hand-shaped bar system made from blue-painted tunnel bricks that pays tribute to the raw beauty of the original Vietnamese house construction, and a 42-year-old bougainvillaea tree that significantly softens the look of the original architectural shell.

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