Paul McGillick Ph.D - Sustainable Luxury: The New Singapore House, Solutions for a Livable Future

CONTENTS

The Mandai Courtyard House is a serenely simple contemporary home. Jalan Mat Jambol is a house without windows. This Neil Road shophouse has been lovingly restored by a very modern couple. The Namly House enjoys its own interior tropical garden. This house by R+Q reveals its full tropical elegance after an extended arrival sequence. The Bamboo Curtain House uses a mix of traditional and natural elements to make a contemporary home. Looking down into the courtyard living/dining space of the Barnstorm House. Two historic trees form part of the landscape at the Belmont Road House.

SUSTAINABLE LUXURY: IS IT A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?

This book presents some of the very best and most luxurious new homes in Singapore. Each of them, in one way or another, represents a response to the challenges of creating luxurious yet sustainable homes in one of the worlds most expensive citiesand in a sweltering tropical climate!

You may assume that luxury is inherently self-indulgent and, therefore, non-sustainable. But is it? The architects of these homes, together with their clients, demonstrate that this is emphatically not the case. This book reveals the many innovative solutions they found in doing so, illustrating in the process how Singapore has become an incubator of innovative residential design.

Crucially, each home achieves its own special kind of luxury through the creativity and imagination of its designers working in close collaboration with their clients. As architect Mark Wee, puts it, Designing a house for a client is, for them, a highly emotional thing it is not just money invested, it is meant to be a setting for them to live for a long time. In fact, with most of the homes in this book, the marriage of luxury and sustainability has been achieved not by spending huge sums of money but by the application of some simple, imaginative and well thought out strategies.

Most of these homes are free-standing landed properties. In the tiny island state of Singapore, this means, by definition, that a lot of money is spent to acquire the land even before the design process begins. Money, though, is forever the elephant in the architectural room. Despite the many lessons learned from traditional architecture about how to live in a tropical climate, money has always provided the resourceas everywhere else in the world that has enabled architecture to experiment, explore and innovate. Over time, the lessons learned from these luxurious projects are applied across the board, including to medium- and low-cost housing.

Rather than viewing luxury and sustainability as being mutually exclusive, it may actually be that true innovation is driven by the desire for luxury, especially given that luxury and comfort mean such different things to different people. Let me give just one example of how a current trend in Singapore is bringing together the issues of luxury, sustainability, innovative design and financial capacity. This is the way in which architects are currently experimenting with multi-generational houses. They are responding to the desire to maintain the extended family, to the high cost of real estate (that encourages adult children to remain at home longer) and to changing social mores which result in people, especially the younger generation, seeking greater independence and privacy. In other words, how do we reconcile privacy and community within the contemporary family home? The result is some very beautiful houses, but houses that are also highly sustainablesocially, culturally, economically and environmentally.

Sustainability: The Big Picture

Sustainability has become a somewhat rubbery term, so let us put things into perspective. There is a lot more to sustainability than simply throwing out the air-conditioner. Showing me over his Travertine Dream House (page ), architect Robin Tan Chai Chong made himself very clear: We dont buy into the trendy new way of describing green architecture. We look at it in a holistic manner. What are our limitations in Singapore? We dont produce anything. We import everything. The task of architecture is to balance consumption.

In this case, the client had worked his way up through a series of modest dwellings to this, his dream house. He wanted all marble finishes. Tan suggested travertine, just as beautiful but less expensive and less ostentatious. The client agreed and went off to Italy to source the travertine himself at a fraction of the cost. That, says Tan, saved resources. Saving money is a kind of sustainability.

The back story to this house is reflected in different ways in all the other homes in this book. Yes, there is money to play with and, yes, these homes are luxurious. But each home is luxurious in a way that is right for the people living in it, and each represents a thoughtful and innovative approach to the challenge of sustainability.

The true splendour of the Andrew Road House by A D Lab (page ) lies below ground level where there is a lush, cool water garden court.

The Mandai Courtyard House (page ), with its modestly scaled living/dining space and engawa deck, is the epitome of the good neighbour.

Just as important is the way the architects and their clients have viewed environmental sustainability as part of a bigger picture. The result is that residential architecture in Singapore is setting new benchmarks, not just in the tropics but throughout the world.

In my previous book, The Sustainable Asian House (2013), the word sustainable was used in the broadest sense, and a number of readers commented that they appreciated the fact that I was not just looking at sustainability in a narrow environmental sense. In this book, I want to be clear from the outset how I define the term since it is often used too loosely and ends up being applied to things that are not even remotely sustainable.