Nestled between Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping district and Bras Basah arts and heritage district, this new residential development sits on a steep sloping hillside site integrating 188 new residences to a historic 131-year old residential bungalow atop the Mt Sophia historic area. The site is characterized by the duality of its contexts.
Haus on Handy
Client
CDL Regulus Pte Ltd
Status
Completed
Location
Singapore
Size
11,498.65 sqm
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
One on hand, there is Handy Road - a vibrant urban street linking shopping malls, commercial shops and public squares. On the other side is Mt Sophia with its quiet and historic residential character. The 2 frontages are also separated by a 45m difference in elevation, which posed great challenges in the design and construction of the project.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
The Tower House, as it was fondly called, was built in 1892. Designed by Crane Brothers and thereafter bought by the Methodist Church in 1932, it became the extension of Methodist Girls’ School across the road at Mt Sophia. The house features an asymmetrical composition culminating in a tower with a two-tiered lantern roof providing it its distinctive silhouette.
The historic building features extensive semi-outdoor spaces, including an iconic octagonal-shaped veranda with deep roof eaves, elegantly floating over the ground plane, as well as extensive decorative and ornamental plasterwork. The new residential development sensitively conserves the historic Tower House and transforms it into a new clubhouse building with various recreational and social facilities to serve the residents, while restoring its historic and architectural features and ornaments, and improving and updating its overall safety and accessibility to the latest Codes.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
The residences are located in 2 apartment tower blocks, which rise up from the hilly terrain of the site. One tower faces the urban street along Handy Rd with views towards Fort Canning and Marina Bay, while the other block is nestled amidst the lush greenery of the hill.
The architectural massing is a response to the architecture and scale of the conservation house. The overall building height and a series of articulated setbacks in the building’s crown articulation from the streets and the conservation house keep the building’s profile low-key in order to maintain the prominence of the historic house and streetscape along Mt Sophia.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Along Handy Road, the building responds to the urban context and the wide frontage through a massing of 5 articulated planting boxes that elegantly float over the pedestrian walkways, respecting the urban edge along Handy Road while providing sheltered connectivity to the public and making the building’s scale more relatable with the streetscape.
The floating expressions of the architecture pay homage to the expression of lightness of the Tower House’s Verandas. In the same way, the residences are afforded with spacious semi-outdoor balconies to take advantage of the warm tropical weather, and are designed with the same expression of lightness along the tower’s façade.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
The project responds to the various ornamental and decorative elements of the Tower House and reinterprets them through contemporary architectural gestures such as the expression of floating elements, the use of intricate screens and patterns, and the fluted panels in the project’s details.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
The interstitial spaces between the apartment blocks are designed as a series of terraced gardens and landscaped spaces, which reference the natural topography of the Site and surround the residences with lush greenery all around. A series of covered walkways surrounded by greenery provide all-weather, accessible and discreet linkages to the newly-conserved clubhouse building. The development also features a lap pool, children’s pool, playgrounds, various sitting lounges, a dining pavilion and a roof garden with views to the city, all interspersed within the landscaped greenery.
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
Image credit: Finbarr Fallon
