PXP Design Workshop follows nature’s cadence with a dramatic, angular family home in Antipolo
“We wanted a home that would let us exhale,” says the owner of this house “After long, demanding days in finance, we imagined a space where we could slow down, reconnect, and feel grounded in nature, the very reason we moved here in the first place.” For their growing family, that meant a house where everyday routines could unfold gently, with room for both gatherings and quiet moments shared with their three children. Antipolo City, with its cool air, evergreen slopes, and views stretching toward Metro Manila, offered that balance. All the family needed was a form-giver that could translate their ideas into something rooted in place and enduring, and as it turns out, they didn’t have to look far. “PXP Design Workshop had already worked with my family on several projects, including my parents’ condo in Ortigas; a compact space that still somehow felt airy, organised, and serene,” the owner recalls. “Their design language of clean lines, cohesive spaces, with an understated resort feel, resonated deeply with us. There’s a quiet confidence in their work that allows the architecture to…
Adaptive reuse: design qua spins old Bangkok shophouses into residential gold
The quest to own a prime house in Bangkok leads to either buying or building, but not so many quality homes come up for sale, and suitable plots are scarce. There is, however, a ‘blue ocean’ solution. Despite the city’s ongoing transition from a low-rise townscape of 60 and more years ago towards an increasingly high-density metropolis dotted with condominium…
La Concha by DCA Plus frames a coastal panorama at Port Dickson
The search for beachside property brought a KL-based Spanish businessman and his German spouse 95-odd kilometres south to a Port Dickson locale, and fortuitously, a vacant 0.14-acre plot. With its stunning view of the Strait of Malacca, the acquisition was a no-brainer; land in hand, the couple began their search for an architect. The eventual appointee, DCA Plus, the offshoot…
Letting the past breathe, giving the present room to grow: Giovanni Gunawan’s Surabaya home.
The courtyard where Giovanni Gunawan once played sits at the centre of PB House, a green-filled pause between the home his grandfather acquired eighty years ago, and the addition he has now designed for his own family. His daughter plays here now, in the same spot he did as a child. Named after the street it’s on, PB House occupies…
And Studio’s Victoria Park Villas interior
“There’s a particular mood of arriving here,” says Samantha Ho of And Studio, describing the approach to Victoria Park Villas in Singapore’s ritzy District 10. “The moment you turn into the estate, the world seems to slow down a little, the city slips away, and the air feels a bit softer.” And it is in this soigné pocket of quiet,…
Tierra Design’s Villa Mayavee revisited: linked pavilions in the Thai tradition
The approach to Villa Mayavee winds through a canopy of trees along Phuket’s west coast, climbing toward the peninsula south of Kamala Beach. The road narrows past low-rise homes scattered among forested hills, ending, eventually, at a private promontory where cliffs drop toward the Andaman Sea. What emerges is a series of horizontal planes that appear to float from the…
Bamboo Home: Aman Sinaya by Carol Karthe
“Good design will define how you fill the space with memories,” says sustainability advocate Celina van Dierendonck. She and her husband Alec recently built a three-story home along the coast of Mati, a quiet town southeast of Davao City. Constructed from 5,000 bamboo poles, the house blends seamlessly with the towering coconut trees around it. Named Aman Sinaya, after the…
In-Ex-trovert, a Cambodian Courtyard house, marks a confluence of cross-border architecture and construction by Essential Design Integrated
A design of house is largely intertwined with the sensibilities and parameters of place. Climate, architecture – international style, vernacular, and everything in between – coupled with labour and materials revolve around local construction norms and techniques, governed by the time-cost-quality trifecta. When emancipated from these, especially in a city like Phnom Penh, the opportunity to adopt a different way…
A Luminous Sanctuary: Wallflower Architecture’s Open Courtyard House in Novena
In the tightly woven fabric of Singapore’s Novena district, where neighbouring houses press close together in the single-minded pursuit of maximising land use, Wallflower Architecture + Design has conjured something rather refreshing and unexpected – a home that exudes tropical languor while maintaining a smart modern silhouette. Founded in 1999 by Robin Tan and Cecil Chee, the studio has made…
Choo Gim Wah’s Rainforest Residence balances Brutalism and artistic sublimity in leafy Janda Baik
From long-span bridges to poetic architecture, off-form concrete is the material of choice the world over. Harnessed across different design eras, it is malleable, uniform, yet highly resilient, lending itself perfectly to the harsh climes of the tropics. Its post-postmodern resurgence in the 2000s heralded a new vernacular in Malaysia that, unconstrained by city and suburban limits, would wind its…
Flooded with light: A Penang shophouse transformed
Here is a study in contrasts: a tranquil residence just yards from a bustling and colourful street scene; a thoroughly Chinese-European-Malay Straits Settlements amalgam situated in George Town’s Little India; above all, one of the oldest shophouses in Penang, probably dating from the 1830s, transformed by the ingenuity of a 21st century designer. This transformation is the work of French…
Highland Haven: The Farmhouse by MOD Studio
Nestled on a 2,000-square-meter rectangular plot in upland Cavite, this rest house serves as a heartfelt tribute to the beauty of Coron, Palawan, the cherished home of its clients. Having moved to Manila due to the challenges of the pandemic, the clients longed for a space that would echo the serenity of island living they had to leave behind. With…
A House of Hidden Vistas by Atelier IF in Upper Bukit Timah
Geoffrey Bawa may have set the template for Tropical Modernism – the idea of blurring the line between exterior and natural ventilated interior spaces in the context of year-round warm and rainy weather – but the tendency of today’s architects, a generation after his death, is to yield to the diktats of clients who demand vast swathes of heat-conducting glass…
Natural Responses: Intsia House, a Makati home designed by Gabriel Schmid
Swiss-Filipino architectural designer Gabriel Schmid would appreciate it if you did not label his first local project, a 1,000-sqm, two-story home in Makati, as a ‘modern bahay-na-bato-at-kahoy.’ Tempting as it may be, Intsia House defies simple categorization. The home possesses a heavy, brick-clad base whose tectonic rigidity is softened by gentle, flared corners, with a procession of arches carved into the…
A Formzero domicile of edible planting leaves its indelible mark in a Kuala Lumpur terraced suburb
Within its placid setting of ‘80s terrace housing, Planter Box House stands as a piece of revisionist architecture that since 2018 has gained widespread attention. Blanketed in vegetation, it is rooted in agriculture – in motive and as leitmotif – which informs its everyday use. ADDRESS revisits the house in full bloom, now in its seventh year, to explore life…
Design Collective Architects syncopates glass and concrete planes within a multigenerational Bukit Tunku home
Of the many residences that striate the slopes of this Kuala Lumpur enclave, Max House is ostensibly on the cutting edge of design. Manifesting the materially-restrained zeitgeist of modern regionalism, this 2,344 sq m four-storey residence doesn’t shy away from limelight. Surrounded by native trees, its pool, decks and floors are dramatically stacked, the defiance of gravity amplified by glass…
Victor Ting of The Carpenter’s Workshop has transformed the interior of a 1930s house in the Guillemard Road neighbourhood
By their own admission, architects can sometimes make the worst clients, plagued, as they are, by over-design and hamstrung by hyper self-criticism and second-guessing. Happily, none of these drawbacks are evident in the Barrack House which is owned and designed by Victor Ting, the principal of Singapore studio, The Carpenter’s Workshop. To hear Ting tell it, what attracted him to…
Right Angle Studio transforms a 15-year-old duplex apartment in Novena to have a clean aesthetic and calm vibe
Long and narrow floor plates are not the easiest to design. Therefore, when Right Angle Studio was confronted with a duplex apartment in Novena that had exactly this, it knew it had a challenging time ahead for itself. Fortunately, the project benefited from the expertise of the two brothers running the firm, who are highly skilled in space planning and…
This monolithic concrete box along Adam Road by Formwerkz Architects is a GCB with an unexpectedly green heart
If you have been to Adam Food Centre recently, you might have noticed an austere, box-like structure directly opposite the entrance to the carpark. At street level, it appears to be entirely formed by concrete and marked by what looks like inscriptions that echo Egyptian hieroglyphs. “People have asked if it is a police station, embassy or even a temple.…
YWA Studio contrasts the fortress-like façade of this semi-detached house in Telok Blangah with open interiors
So successful was YWA Studio in applying a monochromatic palette to parts of this semi-detached house in Telok Blangah that the photographer had to come back to do a reshoot. The reason? “All I saw was a big black mess,” laughs Tan Yue Wei, the Principal Architect and Founder of the design firm. Done in response to the clients’ brief…