For the LOVE OF NATURE

Gwen Tan's house is an anomaly in Singapore's dwelling landscape of helmed-in concrete-and-glass edifices. Nature and its entire vicissitudes are warmly welcomed.

- LUO JINGMEI

Nature has always been part of Gwen Tan’s world. Her childhood home was the genesis. “My house faced a plot of land with a tiny bungalow in the middle of an expansive, jungle-like garden; one could not see the existence of the bungalow, except faintly from the front gate as the vegetation was very overgrown,” says the architect. Tan wears many hats. Aside from being a partner at Formwerkz Architects, she is also co-founder of interior design firm Studio iF and design principal of experience design firm Afternaut.

That neighbour’s house is now a distant memory, having been sold and replaced with a condominium development. But it lives on in the form of her own abode, which she shares with her husband Berlin Lee, her teenage son Adan, her mother and mother-in-law. Here, Tan wakes to vistas of foliage outside the six-metre-long band of windows in her bedroom that overlooks a park. The view was a form of therapy during the COVID pandemic, when she found herself working long hours in the bedroom, drawn to the scenery. “The deep desire for a house where I could have that priceless, undisturbed green connection was most likely dictated subconsciously by the memory of that neighbour’s house, where I could stare out of my bedroom at an alluring piece of ‘wilderness’, with sightings of monkeys, squirrels and rare birds,” she recollects.

She has christened her home Open House as it engages wholeheartedly with the larger environment. Trendsetters would be quick to hail it as an exemplar of eco-living. That it is, but for Tan, it is the only way she can live. From the street, the entry is a fortified wall of timber panelling with only a sliver for the residents to peek out. But above the first storey, a pixelated skin of screens between off-form concrete party walls makes the house porous. Tall, feathery plants cap the car porch canopy as an introductory taste of the gardenscapes within.