Home tour: Old Chang Kee chairman’s gorgeous Singapore house immersed in nature

If the names of the owners sound familiar, it is because they are very much public figures. Han is the executive chairman of Old Chang Kee, the company known for its curry puffs and oft-told origins. Using all his savings, Han had acquired the stall from its original owner, Chang Chuan Boon, as the latter wanted to retire and return to China. Han and Ng transformed it into a well-loved brand that now has about 75 retail outlets across Singapore, as well as outlets abroad in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and London.

When I visit, the Old Chang Kee chairman is enjoying breakfast on a patio overlooking the corner house’s verdant garden. “I enjoy the morning sunshine, and I love plants. We are sitting on high land, so it’s very breezy here,” he comments with a smile. Plants and trees chosen by botanical studio This Humid House embrace the curvaceous, pond-like swimming pool.

John Lim, the studio’s founder, wanted to extend the Old Chang Kee chairman house’s modern interpretation of East Asian nuances into the garden while “ensuring the planting felt rooted in the Singapore climate”. For example, a Chinese pistache tree at the front evokes a sense of arrival and acts as a buffer from the street.

Elsewhere, Borneo kauri and Chinese juniper add “vertical punctuation” and architectural definition to the landscape and evoke a Chinese evergreen forest. Balconies feature sculptural syzygium trees akin to bonsai. “Rather than a garden designed to be admired from afar, this is one to be engaged with. Its qualities unfold gradually, through shifting light, changing perspectives, and in the way the plants mature,” says Lim.

The built-up façade and small windows of the former colonial-era house divorced the interiors from light and the glorious foliage in the park. In contrast, the new dwelling is flooded with natural light. From the outside, the house looks like a series of staggered, stacked baskets. It is a hot day, but indoors, one feels comfort from the abundance of shade thanks to the latticed façade and canopies that stretch from the building’s edges on each level.

This aesthetic also gives the house a distinctive lightweight demeanour despite its large mass. Nicholas Gomes, director of HYLA Architects, who worked with the firm’s founder Han Loke Kwang, and assistant architects Wesley Fong, Carol Huang and Chen Mei Sien to design this home, shares that the architecture’s origins started with feng shui. The pool was positioned to face the park following a geomancer’s approval.

“Although it is a very big house, the spaces are connected,” Gomes states. The first storey’s full-height glass windows open the interiors up to the glorious foliage of the “borrowed scenery” while staggered courtyards connect the five storeys, capped by gardens on both short ends of the house. The leafy silhouette of a tree on each terrace softens the house’s edges.

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As the geomancer said that heavily scented flowers had to be avoided, This Humid House chose Wrightia antidysenterica, whose delicate, star-shaped flowers offer a similar visual delight to jasmine without the fragrance.

The foyer is graced by an antique daybed belonging to Ng. She is an avid collector of antiques, drawn to their craftsmanship and stories. “One of my brothers-in-law who collected antiques introduced this to me. When he married my sister, I was only 15 years old. They brought me everywhere when searching for antiques, so I developed an interest,” she narrates.

Gomes’s team had catalogued the pieces from day one, planning for where they should be best placed. The architecture was created as a backdrop to the pieces, some of which are more than a century old. Gomes highlights the walls of wild oak veneer at the foyer with a distinct patterning that matches Ng’s love of character and colour.

The overall palette was restrained to a few materials: wood, stone, lacquer and fabric for the interior, and aluminium for the lattice, matched with brick walls. In the living area, a tall wall is clad in Black Matrix granite, animated with subtle brushstroke-like veins. “The geomancer said we had to have a ‘mountain’ at this side, hence the stone from Brazil. It looks just like a Chinese painting,” says Gomes.

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Each bedroom is distinguished by a different colour. For example, the master bedroom’s bedhead fabric has gold specks, while the junior master bedroom’s is an autumnal orange. In the bathroom of the latter are tangerine lacquered counters and a Calacatta Viola marble wall. “We looked for different coloured marble,” says Gomes on sticking to the concept of brightening the house through the use of materials.

Ng loves the house’s quirks, such as the curved walls at each staircase landing that were meant for feng shui—“no sharp angles facing this direction”, Gomes explains—but have become cosy nooks for displaying antiques. Overlooking the living area is a mezzanine that is also the mahjong room. “I spend a lot of time here as I also do my work here,” says Ng of this open space, which is surrounded by charming clerestory windows.

The Old Chang Kee chairman and his wife have lived in the house for about five months, so rearranging the various pieces is a work in progress. “We’ll take our time; we have more furniture,” Ng laughs. She praises the design team for the amicable collaboration. “We are not from the industry, so we can only say what we like, then we just trust the team. We had a good time together during the building process. We didn’t have any issues.”

The abode’s name, Heaven and Earth House, came from the skywards-facing trees on each balcony, symbolising a connection between the Earth and the sky. It also relates to the chinoiserie leanings of the couple’s collection of antiques. But this writer also sees a Chinese lantern writ large, surrounded by birdsong and all of nature’s glories. This presents the very image of a Chinese painting, with the house poised elegantly and nobly rooted to the earth on the hill it stands upon, and floating among the sun-streaked clouds.

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