A complex world in a tiny house.

This project was a complete reconstruction of a typical “terraced” house, in a lovely neighbourhood of Singapore. It was a home for a family of five, with children at different stages of growth. The brief painted a familiar set of aspirations: of wishing to balance privacy with maintaining open and connected domestic life. The owners also wanted a house that could operate largely free of air-conditioning, despite the narrow lot and presence of other units on all sides.

Here, the goal of leaving the house mostly open also served the desire for communication among the various rooms; when doors are opened, air flows through from front to back. The tight matrix of rooms is arranged around an air well, scaled so that one can feel a sense of personal space and still be able to speak and hear others across the various spaces. In its design expression, Shelford House adopts the familiar layering of surfaces and operable elements common in tropical modernism.

All images by Khoo Guo Jie