Balancing Act

Architect lan Chee welcomes us into his Singaporean home, where past and present cohabit in perfect equilibrium

- By Daven. Photography by Wu Khoog

You experience a tremendous sense of dislocation upon entering Ian Chee’s apartment in Singapore’s Tiong Bahru, an area known for its listed art deco buildings. The first impulse is to pause at the door, and then step back outside to check your sense of depth and perception, for it hardly seems possible that the relatively nondescript frontage – a white low-rise apartment block built, like the rest of the neighbourhood, in the mid-1930s by the Singapore Improvement Trust as a test case for public housing – could contain such a vast and, well, completely unexpected interior. This must be what it’s like to step into the Tardis. When Chee was apartment hunting a few years ago, the Architectural Association-trained architect found himself drawn to Tiong Bahru as much for its dominant architectural style as for the proportions of the interiors, with their spacious rooms and high ceilings. ‘I was downsizing as I was spending more time in Bali, so I had a few criteria. The possibility of a garden courtyard was key and I also needed to be able to fit in my Steinway,’ he says. ‘I saw quite a few apartments, and they were all very different in size due to the uneven terrain.’

The 145 sq m ground floor apartment he eventually settled on ticked all the boxes, though there were a number of hurdles to overcome first, not least of which was to strip the space down to its bones. ‘The apartment was privatised in the late 1960s and the alterations dated from that period, with different mosaic flooring on different levels,’ Chee remembers. ‘Not much from the original building remained. Even the windows had been changed.’