More than a decade ago, husband and wife Wong Foong Hwee and Soh Kok Leong hired interior designer Kelvin Teo, founder of Space Sense Studio, to design their HDB maisonette. Working in the creative industry as a director and a cameraman, respectively, Foong Hwee and Kok Leong wanted their home to be bold and unique.
Their collaboration with Kelvin was a creative triumph. Inspired by origami, their home landed the cover story of Home & Decor in May 2011, filling pages after pages with exciting interior shots of design features like a sculptural staircase, a ladder that serves as an art installation and a lego bookcase.
It says something about your design practice when your clients return to you to design their next home. In April last year, Foong Hwee and Kok Leong moved into their new home, a 1,400 sq ft resale HDB flat in the Bukit Merah area, which Kelvin designed with the same playful energy.
AT A GLANCE
Who lives here: A couple in their 50s
Home: A five-room resale HDB flat in Bukit Merah
Size: 1,400 sq ft
ID: Space Sense Studio
“It begins with Foong Hwee’s love for caravan,” shares Kelvin of the starting point of the design. “Then we decided to create a garage inspired interior.”
The finished home blends the owners’ existing furniture and accessories collection with new and custom industrial, vintage, and automotive-inspired features into a functional yet delightfully cool home.
The home’s character shines through from the moment one crosses the threshold inside. The front door is made of steel and finished in matte black paint. Kevin demarcated the foyer and living space using colours.
The foyer area features the same shade of deep black, featuring dark timber-look tiles, a black ceiling and black walls. Black storage next to the door creates an angle while a white-painted shoe rack stands out on the other side.
The adjoining living room is spacious; its surfaces are predominantly finished in grey. Kelvin did not hack the original flooring, opting for a less disruptive method of refreshing the flooring by layering it with concrete-look vinyl.
He reduced the number of bedrooms to just two. One former bedroom was hacked to create a dry kitchen and a dining area that flows seamlessly into the living room.
The owners are big on cooking; hence the wet kitchen became a major focal point in the design.
It is contained inside a caravan food truck “parked” next to the dining area, giving the impression that the whole space is a cool garage where equally cool people hang out.
Clad in aluminium panels with rivets placed along each panel’s seams, the caravan was meant to be the centrepiece of the room.
“The dimensions were properly calculated to make sure it fits into the house,” says Kelvin, sharing that Foong Hwee even went to buy an actual car wheel to make it look more realistic.
The caravan opens up to form a breakfast counter that serves two. Inside, the wet kitchen sports white cabinetry and wall tiles.
The dry kitchen also sports the same white cabinets. A square island with a concrete-look countertop mediates the dry kitchen and dining area. It features drawers and storage at its base.
The dining table’s top matches the island, while the dining chairs are delightfully mismatched.
The set includes recognisable designs like Eames Wire side chairs and Blu Dot Real Good Chair in deep orange, which were the same chairs the couple used in their old, origami-inspired home.
The living room also features a collection of mismatched and genuinely retro furniture, including the custom drawn Herman Miller Eames Moulded Shell Rocking Chair and Knoll Barcelona chair.
The garage theme can appear hard and cold. Kevin cleverly tempered this with accent colours and curves.
Throughout this monochromatic home, pops of bright orange from furniture, appliances and cinema posters lend freshness to the colour palette.
Orange is Foong Hwee’s favourite colour. In fact, the vintage-inspired orange stove in the kitchen is the first new item she acquired for the home, around which the design of the kitchen was centred.
It inspired a slew of details like the accent orange stripes of the caravan, the sunset-coloured Le Creuset crockery, the custom orange trim of the hood, and many more.
The door of the master bedroom is a custom aluminium flight wing with rivet studs, rounded corners and stripes of colour that might fool onlookers into thinking that it’s taken from a real plane.
Inside is a tranquil haven for rest. Kelvin kept the original flat’s parquet flooring and installed a custom bed with a curved headboard and cantilevered base that allows a robot vacuum cleaner under it.
The centrepiece of the bedroom is the custom curving door to the bathroom.
Kelvin says it is not fritted glass, which would have been heavy and next to impossible to curve, but it is an acrylic sheet bent to a beautiful curve by a local fabricator in Ang Mo Kio.
Paired with a curving steel frame, it evokes a chic retro vibe. Behind it is a spacious bathroom, which has been enlarged to accommodate a bathtub.
Little details, like this old-school wall lamp installed on the curved ceiling, lends a cool industrial look.
Like the owners’ previous home, this garage-inspired home, which cost $150K to renovate, provides a unique experience for those who visit and a perfect home for those who live in it.
This article was first published in Home & Decor.