Singular

Singapore firm RT+Q Architects carves out breathing spaces from the sides of a terrace house to make it feel like a breezy single-detached residence.

- Judith Torres

Mr. and Mrs. Kay were perfectly happy with their 1960s terrace house, and if it weren’t for the termites, it would not have occurred to them to have it redone. But once they agreed to build anew, Mrs. Kay decided she wanted a complete change from the house she and her husband had lived in for 30 years.

“It was your typical Sixties Singapore terrace house, very expatriate—white, with a pitched roof, red clay tiles on top, and a terrazzo floor. It was a bit dark inside. RT+Q, of course, is very modern and I told TK and Rene I wanted a lot of air. Cross ventilation is very important to me. And light.”

RT+Q Architects delivered on the brief and then some. They cut out 2-by-7-meter slots in the floor plan at the front and rear of the house to set it back from the neighbors’ party walls on either side. By sacrificing 28 square meters, the terrace house now feels and looks (from the inside) like a breezy single-detached residence. “I am so pleased with the results,” says Mrs. Kay, who proceeds to enumerate the benefits of the two features.

The front slot serves as a passageway for tradesmen and for taking the trash out from the kitchen without passing through the front door, a convenience the original house didn’t have. Open all the way through from the ground to attic level, the two-meter setback lets only indirect light in for most of the day and allows the spaces facing the void to ventilate—a benefit that makes all the difference for the glass-faced stairwell and the elegant marble powder room on the ground floor.