Home tour: a Bukit Timah Good Class Bungalow that reframes time with architecture, art and shared memory

The Good Class Bungalow’s architect, Brenda Ang of Lab Architects, calls it ART House, short for Architecture Reframes Time. “Architecture establishes the frame, landscape and family life animate it, and time continually reframes the composition,” she reveals.

For its owners, a biotechnology entrepreneur and his wife who share the house with their three young children and pet dog, underpinning that architectural idea is the Hebrew concept of hesed: steadfast love and faithfulness.

“Light shifts, water moves, children grow and family life evolves,” says the homeowner. “Hesed speaks to the foundation we believe should remain constant beneath it all.” Together, these ideas neatly sum up the design of the home, both outside and in.

Ang drew inspiration from Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz’s reflections on his Casa de Retiro Espiritual in shaping ART House. “This house is not a building: it is a thought,” Ambasz wrote. “It is a place where silence has an architecture and the landscape a voice.”  Site and function set the spatial programme in motion.

Tucked into a secluded corner of the neighbourhood, the plot falls away steeply. Ang’s architectural volumes embrace the slope; the entrance sits at its midpoint, with two storeys rising above and two descending below. Because the land drops away, even the lowest levels open onto daylight and verdant greenery.

The floor plan is articulated into two wings, with a long lap pool between them as its spine. These wings were designed as asymmetrical to enhance the spatial experience, the view, the functions contained within. Seen from the rear of the site, the left wing is all mass and enclosure, shielding the private quarters on its upper levels and casting deep shade over the poolside deck below.

The right wing is a hollowed-out timber frame, open at the front and back, that frames the sky and the forest beyond. “Ironically, the best way to be symmetrical is to be asymmetrical,” says the homeowner. When asked to elaborate, he shares that to achieve pleasing spatial experiences, a house of this scale cannot be composed as a series of rigid blocks, which would feel monumental in an imposing way.

Ang therefore broke these functions apart and articulated them as a sequence of varied spatial experiences. “The house balances openness with protection,” she says. “Its transparent living spaces are buffered by distance, deep overhangs, layered screens, planting and landscape, creating privacy, shade and calm without surrendering light or the connection to nature.” 

Wrapping the wings are vertical fins in two materials and sizes, ceramic towards the street and aluminium at the rear. From the outside, they read as a screen of elegant translucency. From within, they filter sunlight into shifting patterns, block diagonal views from below, and break wind-driven rain.

Besides the architect, the owners also worked closely with interior designer Foong Wai of Thinking Caps. “Brenda, Foong Wai, my wife and I worked as a fluid team,” says the homeowner. “We did not believe in drawing a hard line between the architect’s responsibility for the exterior and the interior designer’s responsibility for the rooms.”

The transitions between the indoors and outdoors, the placement of the art, the lines of sight and even the way natural light enters a space, he adds, all work in great synergy.

“We wanted the experience of arriving home to feel like a transition rather than an immediate reveal,” says the homeowner. Facilitating this arrival is a foyer designed like an art gallery. On the wall hangs Donna Huanca’s Huichols Princess, a 2017 vivid blue painting that sets the tone for the art-filled rooms beyond.

Overhead, a three-metre Murano glass chandelier by Massimiliano Schiavon brings centuries-old technique to a thoroughly modern form. A bespoke geometric door with a dichroic finish conceals the shoe cabinets   and cloakroom, disguised as an artwork in its  own right.

Surprisingly, the master suite and all three children’s rooms are also on this level, accessible via a discreet door tucked to one side of the gallery. Together, they occupy the private half of the floor plan, looking out over the rear garden. “It was important to us that the family remained physically close while the children were young,” the homeowner explains.

The level above holds his study and an art-filled entertaining space, while the uppermost floor  serves as a family and guest suite, where the children study with their tutors and play with their cousins when friends aren’t staying over.

On the other side of the gallery is the spiral staircase, a helix of metallic champagne casing and marble treads. It descends to the living level, where Ju Ming’s 1996 copper figure from his Taichi series stands at the junction of the living room, dining room and wine cellar. “To me, it is a reminder that strength can lie in balance, restraint and adaptability rather than force alone,” says the homeowner.

The homeowner and his wife have collected art for around a decade, though never, he says, “as an exercise in filling walls or assembling recognisable names”. The works that matter most are connected to “a particular period, place, relationship or idea”. In certain parts of the home, some of these enhance the desired mood, while in others, they are the starting visual cue. 

The formal dining room, most notably, grew around Picasso’s seminal lithograph Lobsters and Fish (1949). It was the couple’s first major acquisition, which they found by accident in a Beverly Hills gallery early in their entrepreneurial journey, when the elderly gallerist, taken with their ambition to develop medicines for serious diseases, offered them the work and let them pay for it over time. Around it, Schiavon’s commissioned Murano vessels, a Minotti dining table, and black-and-gold Portoro Super stone were chosen to relate to one another.

At the other end of the scale is a modest sketch of the Arc de Triomphe, purchased from a street artist in Montmartre. It shaped the breakfast area, whose arches and cream-and-champagne palette recall long mornings in Parisian cafes.

Other works record the family’s own story. Seth Armstrong’s Positano, commissioned for the couple’s tenth wedding anniversary, captures a night on the Amalfi Coast as seen from a boat, with two small figures of husband and wife in the very clothes they wore that evening. “It contains a private record of our marriage and that particular moment in time,” the homeowner explains.

A residue painting by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng, Evelyn’s Breath was Oxygen I Leaned to Take In, formed through a process of transformation over time, speaks to them of parenthood. “Children may begin from the same family and share something of the same source,” he says, “but time, circumstance and individuality ultimately transform each of them into a distinct person.”

In the living room, Henry Hudson’s 51.4950649, 0.0448773,  stretching almost five metres across a wall, holds a conversation with the pool beyond. Its swirling blue and gold reminded the family of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, their eldest child’s favourite painting.

“The house was conceived not simply as a sequence of rooms, but as a sequence of moods,” says the homeowner, “at times contemplative and still, at others expansive, expressive and deeply social.” The listening room, designed and integrated by Clarity Group Singapore with Wisdom Audio loudspeakers and limited-edition Mark Levinson amplification, does double duty.

With the children, it becomes a home cinema; for the homeowner, it is a place to decompress. “I listen mainly to classical, jazz and Chinese music, often alone and in stillness,” he says.

The rear garden, meanwhile, is where their pet dog runs free, and a green buffer between the family and the world beyond. Most of its mature trees were bought fully grown, then planted to screen the house from prying eyes.

Cultural influences surface throughout. Japan lingers in the fair-faced concrete and framed views inspired by Tadao Ando’s architecture, in the koi pond with its sculptural podocarpus tree, and in the hand-painted, kiln-fired Japanese tiles that line the water features. Chinese culture, as with the Ju Ming, appears as philosophy rather than ornamentation.

Weekends bring the extended family. The grandparents gather in the living room over music, the children drift between the garden and the pool, and dinner moves to the dining room. “The formal dining room is not preserved for rare occasions; it is used,” he says.

Even Schiavon’s Murano vessels, substantial and valuable, are discreetly secured to the furniture rather than put away, and the wines in the cellar are there to be opened with friends and family rather than kept “as investments or display objects”. His philosophy, he explains, is that “things are meant to be used and enjoyed rather than treated as objects to which one becomes beholden”.

Years from now, the children may each remember something different: the pool, a painting, the dog running through the reception. What their parents hope they recall is not a particular object or material, but “a warm home in which they spent time with one another”, and “the ordinary occasions that became the most important memories”.

NOW READ

Inside a doctor couple’s Bukit Timah Good Class Bungalow inspired by the idea of bird watching

A Good Class Bungalow in Singapore’s District 10, a microcosm of nature articulated as five pavilions

A refreshed Bukit Timah Good Class Bungalow inspired by art