Sustainable Luxury: The New Singapore House, Solutions for a Livable Future by Paul McGillick

Author:Paul McGillick [McGillick, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780804844758
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2015-03-30T21:00:00+00:00

The staircase spirals down into the basement car park and entertainment room.

On the ground floor, a breakfast bar faces the footbridge to the floating living/dining pavilion.

The journey actually begins at the gate where the visitor first sees an undulating vista of lawn and trees. Then, as the driveway turns, the original house comes into view followed by the addition which, says the client, ‘acts like a shadow of the original house’.

Residents continue to the underground basement car park but guests still enter through the original house. The client and her mother live in the old wing where the front room, above the entry, has been converted into a conservatory. Opposite is the master bedroom where everything is panelized to conceal the storage spaces. The bedroom also houses a home office, which is also integrated as a piece of joinery. The link to the bathroom features vanity mirrors with vertical lightboxes, picking up again on the Art Deco mood of the building.

The central part of the building acts as a link to the ‘men’s wing’ where the two sons live on the upper level and the grandfather has his own ‘apartment’ on the ground floor. This is essentially a gallery space—although there is a business centre on the upper floor and the kitchen below—where the two levels of the addition are connected by a lift and a handsome spiral staircase with a timber screen and micaceous iron oxide balustrade. The gallery is wide, and the sunlight filtered through an enfilade of operable vertical louvres makes it an ideal space for the client’s art collection. On both levels, at the point where the addition elbows around to the various bedrooms, including a guest bedroom with its own pantry, there are TV/sitting rooms with views out to the Japanese garden of trees and bamboo and where even the neigbour’s swimming pool is successfully ‘borrowed’ as part of the landscape. The bedrooms themselves look out past terraces to the main garden.

This house is culturally, socially and environmentally sustainable. It is an example of a strategy for sustaining the extended family by taking an existing site and developing its capacity to accommodate several generations, simultaneously providing privacy and the opportunity to be together. Through the sensitive way in which it has brought old and new together, it is also an example of how a sense of continuity over time can be spiritually and emotionally sustaining for individuals, families and communities.

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