In the case of the Open House, the Architect was designing a multi-generation home for herself, her husband, a son and his two grannies.

Due to the couple’s busy work schedule on weekdays, weekends are precious to catch up on family time. There is an eagerness to see and hear everyone when they are home on the weekends. The couple’s desire to take in the sights and sounds of their family members about their activities in the house also influenced the planning of the spaces within the house.
A central driver to fulfil this desire was embracing openness in the house, so as to create visual connections in the living spaces of the house so that family members could see, hear each other and have conversations easily throughout the house although they may be scattered around the house. Openness was sought in all aspects of the design, to the external and nature and internally, amongst the living spaces for the family.

In increasingly urbanized and dense Singapore, low-rise dwellings have become increasingly introverted. Opportunistic of the lush verdure of canopies surrounding the site, the design aspired for a permeable architecture that not only borrowed lush views but imbued the house with an openness to its surrounding context of the neighbourhood through the use of contemporary tropical architecture elements.