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

Architect Alan Tay, a co-founder of Formwerkz Architects, conceived the house for the family of six as a “microcosm”. Deeply influenced by Chinese garden landscapes, the structures are “designed to frame and create a world within a world—a miniaturised universe fortified yet connected to its context.”

It helps that the capacious land, combined from two Good Class Bungalow (GCB) plots to just over 14,208 sq ft, has ample room for this concept, which took 28 months to complete.

From the street, one sees an understated composition of light and dark volumes alternating between beige roughcast plaster, smooth honed travertine, grey granite and dark timber. This dark-and-light palette helps “reveal the colour of the garden, and register light and shadow with the passing clouds,” says Tay. These surfaces “bridge the built structures with landscape, both becoming part of an ‘intellectualised’ (or abstracted) nature.”   

The “pavilions” surround a central garden that traces the topography of the sloped land. “When it rains, it’s beautiful,” says Tay, describing cascading water flanked by meandering trees and shrubs. This garden is his version of the central lake in traditional Chinese gardens, overlooked by the “master pavilion” containing the master bedroom, three bedrooms, and a family lounge at the highest point.

“This main house is in the commanding position on top of the hill looking down. Feng shui-wise, it faces [an auspicious] north-to-south direction,” Tay comments. The other pavilions—entrance, living room, study, and moongate—are strung in between these two blocks, linked by a sheltered pathway on the outer ring. Traversing through the house becomes a visceral journey alternating between light and shade, and of course rain during some days.

Each pavilion has a distinct character. For example, the living room pavilion provides drama with its double height. Timber joinery rises to the ceiling, and a faux picture frame hung among other framed art plays a spatial trick, revealing itself as a window of lotus on a pond. The family lounge in the master pavilion is double height too, but aside from framing nature outside, it also brings greenery inward with a lush indoor garden.

The corridors to the bedrooms look into this atrium, which is flush with daylight from metal fins across the ceiling. This pavilion reiterates the architecture team’s adroit manipulation of space and sightlines, with openings on different levels and rooms layering vistas from the master bathroom; one can even see the tips of city skyscrapers through another window in the family lounge. 

These mises en scène result from multiple strategies. “The fragmented spatial organisation, network of meandering paths, and visual strategies of borrowed sceneries and ‘leaked’ views guide the design of multi-sensorial and sometimes symbolic experiences as one circumambulates the compound,” says Tay. “There is no singular moment but much to discover [of the] time of day or seasons—even in our equatorial tropics.” 

The house becomes not just a functional shelter, but part of “an intellectualised nature to apprehend and scale the sublime,” adds Tay. The sublime is made tangible also through the work of landscape design firm Salad Dressing, whose living protagonists bring life to this compound.

Among these are the Timor black bamboo with its vertical rhythm of stalks and filigreed leaves, the Cassia fistula whose seasonal blooms turn the canopy golden, and the romantic silver weeping tea tree whose tapestry-like foliage dip low toward the grass.  Of course, the Buddhist pine bonsai is the star. “It is perfect to be sculpted to emulate ancient, wind-swept mountain trees through meticulous pruning and wiring,” says Tay.

The potted plant stretches asymmetrically out of a moongate in the Moon Pavilion that contains it, as if in a frozen dance. A pool surrounds the pavilion, accented by a circular feature that abstracts a fallen moon captured in the water’s reflection.

There is so much poetry and elegance in this house and garden that, for sure, it belongs to a client with a cultivated sensibility and appreciation for art and life in all forms.

It is thus apt that the house has been christened Duke’s Retreat. Furnishings, furniture and decor—altogether a tasteful, comfortable and subtle edit picked out by the client together with interior design firm Pure Interiors also complement rather than distract from the architecture.

“Much is spent on the garden beyond what one would in a typical house. Then again, the garden here is very much an extension of architecture as [the team at] Formwerkz convinced me,” says the owner, who has continued the narrative indoors with chandeliers of falling crystal leaves, artworks in the natural history style, and even cushions that mimic botany, blurring the line between living and landscape.

NOW READ

Inside Sentosa Cove’s Plinth House, the first landed home with structural mass engineered timber in Singapore

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

How Banyan Group chief architect Ho Kwon Cjan designed his Good Class Bungalow around a rain tree