Design Your Convivial Home With Communal Space

Designed to host large parties, the communal spaces are the heart of this convivial home.

- Isabelle Tow

For gourmands Janan and Sherry, restaurant owners who love to cook and host large parties, it was clear that roomy and inviting communal spaces listed high in their priorities for their first marital home. At 1,300sq ft, their 4-room resale apartment has a generous footprint, but the couple had little use for the third bedroom and found the closed kitchen layout claustrophobic.

In their brief to Salt Studio, the couple had few demands besides the request to enlarge the living area; incidentally, the pastel palette that sets the home apart was decided later, over several tweaks to the mood board. “Initially, our proposed mood board consisted mostly of whites and neutral tones,” says Jerry Lee, their interior designer. After subsequent discussions about the aesthetic direction, the couple displayed an interest in pastel pinks for the living room and had also picked out a bubblegum pink Smeg fridge that they wanted for their kitchen—key elements that would anchor the colour theme for their vibrant yet soothing home.