Atelier IF

Atelier IF takes delight in questioning the familiar and negotiating the peculiar.

It believes in the value of well-crafted, tailor-made spatial responses that bring delight to its users through a sensitive understanding of each Client’s brief.

Not confined by the traditional definitions of Architecture but seeing Architecture in the small and the large, in the temporary and the permanent. celebrating the charm of temporary interventions and approaching the permanent in a tactile and material manner, tracing the hand of time to craft sensitive, thoughtful interventions.

ATELIER IF wants to explore the Why nots and What IFs to realise new possibilities.

It is in the business of telling stories through spaces.

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Q&A with Fiona Tan, Atelier IF: the ability to distil narrative into essential spatial elements speaks to architecture’s fundamental power to move and transform us.

In your practice, you’ve described a desire to craft spaces that tell the stories of their inhabitants through a tactile and material-based approach. Could you share an example of a project where materiality played a central role in shaping that story? I see each architectural project as an opportunity to create a spatial narrative that is reflective of its users and their lifestyles. Materials contribute a crucial sensory dimension, extending beyond spatial sequences to actively shape and transform how one experiences space. In the House of Many Faces, we designed a singular floating pebble wash ‘step’ to create a gentle bridge between the rougher floor finish of the outdoor living room and the polished terrazzo of the interior. Elsewhere in the home, the perforated metal mesh flooring of the reading deck allows the filtering of light to the other shared spaces. Other rooms feature distinct material choices: screed flooring in the study loft, coloured micro cement in the guest room, and a combination of oak wood and terrazzo in communal areas. These material transitions allow occupants to experience the home’s…

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 and the corresponding need for 24/7 air-conditioning. Set along a row of semi-detached manses in the Upper Bukit Timah neighbourhood, the House of Hidden Vistas is a valiant iteration of Bawa’s enduring concern for creating spaces that balance shade and light, shelter from the elements and access to the natural elements. Designed and built by Atelier IF, the 600 sqm home hides behind a deceptive massing of geometrical blocks — two storeys facing the street, and three at the rear – connected by a steeply sloping roof. The owners’ brief, says the studio’s founder Fiona Tan, was to have a sense of the outdoors and greenery. This, despite the relatively tight plot, which, nevertheless, required the insertion of four bedrooms,…

Atelier IF

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