This renovated 1960s house in Singapore is designed to feel timeless

This house renovation is called Kampung Sayang – love for kampung – and it is not hard to see why. The home is closely tied to its garden and the elements, and to family and community – echoing rural Malay kampungs, where open doors invite neighbourly conversation amid tropical landscapes.

The nostalgia associated with kampungs felt especially poignant here for another reason: This Bukit Timah house was the owner’s childhood home. His wife, who showed me around one sunny morning, said her husband had grown up here and that they lived in the house for 12 years after they married.

The couple later had three children and, when they needed more space, bought the plot next door, living beside the owner’s parents. The wife said there used to be a connecting door between the two houses. After her parents-in-law died, they bought that house and sold their former one.

She is a retired CFO of a global cosmetics brand. Her husband is the CEO of a local F&B company. With their children grown but still living at home, the couple decided to renovate and expand the footprint of the two-storey house, built in the 1960s.

Architect Eugene Seow said there was a conscious effort to preserve the memories tied to the old house, while creating practical new spaces for the family. He worked on the project with architectural designer Emily Zheng.

Seow owns CDG Architects. “It is a reboot of an older architectural practice called Comprehensive Design Group first started by my mentor and architect Vijaya Raghavan in 1979,” he explained. As Vijaya moved into retirement over the past decade, Seow took over and rebranded the practice as CDG Architects in 2018. He now runs the firm with business partners RJ Zheng and Ken Tan.

Many house renovations in Singapore aim for glossier, more modern results, but that was not the case here. A Brutalist raw-concrete exoskeleton enveloped the old structure, which was expanded on three sides and softened by landscaping, mature trees and potted plants. An attic was also added.

“Set on a roughly square-shaped plot that sat higher than the surrounding road level, we chose to use the exposed concrete structural shell evoking a sense of robustness and permanence that is lifted off the ground,” said Seow. During my visit, the interplay of nature and shelter felt rustic and deeply homely.

He elaborated: “Instead of a solid monolith, the concrete structure reads as an open and permeable frame that wraps itself around the second-storey bedrooms and family areas of the old house. The open facade allows cross ventilation and shaded eaves, while also framing views from within.”

To preserve the memory of living here, many internal walls and layouts were left unchanged. Seow described the project as a “selective expansion”, aligned with the couple’s desire to be sustainable and efficient, and to reuse materials where possible. For instance, the patio flooring was made from offcuts bought from a contractor friend who had leftovers from another project.

Seow said the heart of the old house lay in its main living and dining areas, and the front garden where family gatherings had taken place over decades. That became the anchor for the new layout, which expanded upwards and outwards from the old structure.

He retained as much of the garden as possible. “This openness of the house to the existing garden became the main design driver for us,” said the architect. The new spaces on the first storey included a sheltered car porch and patio on one side, a front patio, and a wet kitchen with a granny en-suite on the other. In between, the dry kitchen was extended towards the garden, with large windows framing the view.

On the second story, two new bedrooms were added to one side. A guestroom was created on the old foyer’s roof, linked to an open terrace above the sheltered car porch. “The family wanted a little balcony and have tea in the mornings,” said Seow on this breezy, balmy spot.

I asked about a unique wall lamp, and Seow shared a tidbit: The wife’s late father, Charles KK Chua, was a well-known architect in Malacca and designed it. He said Chua had designed a project in the Orchard Road area that was later demolished, and the wife kept the lamps. Six or seven are scattered throughout the house.

A sixth-generation Peranakan Baba, Chua came from a family with two ancestral homes in Malacca. One of them – where the family still lives – is now the Malacca Heritage Centre, showcasing a large collection of Peranakan furniture, antiques and household objects.

In the Singapore house, the new attic storey houses a second family room, the master bedroom en-suite, a laundry room and a generous terrace decked with timber from the former house’s pitched-roof rafters. The concrete grid contains these new spaces neatly, offering a clear reading of old and new – and a stoic backdrop to the garden’s wild proliferation of plants.

Besides integrating existing brick walls into the new layout, old window and door grilles were turned into flooring details and facade screens. Timber roof rafters were also repurposed into movable planters. “This plays on the notion of ‘embodied memories’ of reinterpreting and inhabiting the spaces, and helps reduce the house’s carbon footprint,” Seow said.

Inside the house, the wife reused many of the old timber furniture, and introduced new ones that evoke memories of her family home in Malacca. “We try to reuse as much as possible,” she said. “The family has this ethos of trying not to have too much waste,” Seow added. Between the living room and kitchen is a timber swing door, known as a pintu pagar, commonly found in Peranakan shophouses and fitted with stained-glass infill. The wife said it was bought on Carousell from a homeowner. Together, these elements add charm and a tangible sense of time.

Another such feature is the staircase, where a metal scissors staircase folds to one side on the first storey. This existed in the old house, as were the mosaic flooring and breeze blocks in this stair core. “When we moved in with my in-laws, there was a break-in in the neighbourhood. So my mother-in-law made sure we were able to lock this door so strangers could not go upstairs,” said the wife, laughing. “But we keep it open now.”

Seow also designed a new staircase linking the second storey to the attic, deliberately giving it a curved form for a bit of drama as one ascended the double-volume space and turned back towards the front of the house. From there, the view opened up to treetop canopies across neighbouring estates and the nature reserve beyond.

The garden on the ground storey holds as many stories as the house itself. “We’re used to having this whole garden empty because my husband and his siblings used to play soccer here, and the neighbourhood kids would come to play too,” the wife shared. “As the garden was always the focus of the old house, a biophilic approach was taken to blur the boundaries of both house and garden. This was achieved by allowing the house to be open and receptive to the natural elements and surrounding landscape on the whole,” Seow explained.

A row of existing Cook pines along the garden’s front boundary was kept, Seow said, strengthening the spatial memory and the relationship between the new house, the old garden and its neighbours. Malaysian landscape architect Inch Lim of Inchscape collaborated on the design.

Seow said Lim, a personal friend of the wife, advised on reusing and transplanting existing plumeria and orange jasmine trees, along with shrubs from the family’s former home next door. New fruit trees such as banana and papaya, and fruiting vines such as loofah and pumpkin, were added to complement the existing greenery.

The wife said she was sceptical at first about adding more landscaping to what had been an empty garden. “But now I really like it because it blocks the view from the road. It’s a little bit wild out there, like walking in the woods,” the wife said. The greenery has been given time and space to flourish without being overly manicured.

Seow paid close attention to the thresholds between building and landscape, so that moving outdoors felt natural and effortless. Some of these edges are also habitable and intuitive to use. For instance, timber seats along the long balcony linking the front second-storey bedrooms – made from upcycled roof rafters – offer a contemplative spot.

“In the evenings, it’s nice to open the doors at the balcony. My daughter also likes to read here,” said the homeowner. “The deliberate use of thresholds in the form of overhanging eaves and verandahs, and carefully designed self-sustaining biophlic pools and overflow ponds, further dissolved the boundary between indoor and outdoor,” Seow explained.

One of the pools takes the form of a longkang – a Hokkien word meaning gutter or drain – running along the patio. Seow said there had already been one here, and they enlarged it. When I noticed small fish swimming inside, the wife laughed and said: “My husband used to play in the longkang catching fish, so we added some.”

It is not just an aesthetic feature lined with stones. The sound of flowing water is therapeutic, and Seow pointed out that it is functional too, overflowing into the drain. At the end of the longkang, he installed a steel sculpture evoking a Chinese moon gate, designed to blend into the greenery and serve as a visual and physical anchor, while marking a formal entryway at the car porch.

Sitting at the patio table, the garden view felt calming and invited casual conversation. The wife pointed out a bird in the trees, and said there were many creatures around – lizards and squirrels. “Civet cats too,” Seow added.

Above, coconut husks hung in a lively pattern from a mesh canopy across the facade. “I don't like plastic. I think this is a more eco-friendly and natural way of potting,” said the wife. “I’ve got passion fruit and another flower, Cassida. But the first one that went up was the loofah [vines], which grew very well.”

She said the family regularly composted food in the garden. Every so often, they dug a hole and buried the scraps. Whatever grew, grew. “We get all sorts of things, like pumpkins growing all over the place. Rock melons too, but they don’t grow well here. So that was just once.”

“The pumpkins were growing so well that she decided it was a little too wild and removed them,” Seow recalled. “We went away for Chinese New Year and when we came back, half the garden was covered with pumpkins. They even climbed a tree!” said the wife, laughing. The family’s dog benefitted from the crop. “She ate pumpkin everyday, so we didn’t have to feed her.”

That attitude echoed Seow’s approach to the architecture. “You can see this is what the house is really about – a lot of reusing and just trying to be one with nature,” Seow commented. The renovation, he added, was not meant to give the old house a new sheen; it was new construction, but designed to feel as though it had been here for a long time, alongside the old house and the family.

He reflected that the house was more than an enclosure. Seow said that while the team and owners shared a common direction in designing a home that responded to its past and its environment, the process also taught them how to live and build more sustainably within their surroundings.

Seow also appreciated how hands-on the owners were, down to the details. He said ideas such as using rainwater spouts, hanging planting mesh and repurposing materials from the old house emerged organically along the way. In the process, he said, he gained a deeper understanding of how living well with nature and community can have a profound effect on wellbeing.

Before I left, the wife showed Seow several old timber doors leaning against a guest-room wall. She had found them in her family home in Malacca and wanted his advice on repurposing them as partitions, so she could close off certain areas for air-conditioning. She said she once saw the doors stacked in a storeroom and was struck by how beautiful they were. They had belonged to her father, and in his last days, he touched up the gold paint.

Seow remarked: “As you can see, this house is an on-going project.” The lady of the house burst into laughter, and I left them discussing ways to personalise the beloved old-new home.