The Jungle Look

Leading Singapore doctor and all-round polymath Easaw Thomas has landscaped an undulating dream home that will inspire lovers of botany, fine furniture, art and recycling.

- Jonathan Evans

From street level, 2 Wilby Road in Singapore’s affluent Bukit Timah seems, if anything, nondescript compared to its grandiose neighbours. Foliage tumbles from the front garden over a wooden fence, while an unkempt, once-white pillar modestly bears the address. But behind a black gate, a steep driveway circling around an Art Deco conservatory is lined with forest trees, offering an early hint of its owner’s predilections.

In this cosy nook, flanked by lithographs of maharajahs in the Empire era and Bengali contemporary art, sits genial polymath Dr Easaw Thomas. Co-winner of the National Parks Board gardening competition in 2006 and world corporate secretary for the International College of Surgeons, this anaesthetist, horticulturalist and oenophile starts recounting his life story with childlike enthusiasm.

Keralan by descent and born in Malaysia, the perma-smiling Dr Thomas moved from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore as a nine-year-old boy. “That influenced me a lot,” he recalls. “My relatives were here, so they’d take me to the forest. I bought this house in 1990, rented it and planted as many trees as I could.”

The medic beckons me over to behind the main body of the house into a broad courtyard. A pathway bifurcates a koi-inhabited pond, while a tree house – Dr Thomas’s bedroom – stands imperiously over the lush tropical scene.

“In 1998, my tenant told me he was going to Zurich, so I took over the place. There used to be a two-storey house in the middle here, and I took it down on the suggestion of my architect. Then this whole concept of building it ‘into the hill’ came to fruition.”

The arduous process of reshaping the earth behind the old house – which had been built in 1937 – and installing new rooms and a garden on the upper levels, took two years.