Home Tour: $115,000 Renovation for a young couple’s 4-room HDB along Punggol Drive
Designing his own home has made this interior designer realise that he is the most difficult client to please, but the result makes it all worthwhile.
By Lynn Tan -
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Having lived in rather large HDB flats growing up, Samuel Lee, an interior designer-contractor who is the director and lead designer of Atum Interior, and his wife, Pearlynn Chia, a quantity surveyor had to adjust to the smaller size of their new flat. “We were willing to make compromises, but not lose the features that we grew up with, and wanting even more modern comforts while trying to make it all fit in was tough,” he admits.
In renovating his own home, he allowed himself to be guided by what he has always practised as an interior designer - focus on being intuitive and purposeful and pay attention to the ergonomics and the spatial flow. “I believe in making the most of the space that we have and every bit of the home should feel intentional and well-considered,” he emphasises.
Who Lives Here: An interior designer-contractor and his quantity surveyor wife
Home: A 4-room HDB flat at Punggol Drive
Size: 1,001 sq ft
Animal Communicator
The couple, both 32 years old, agreed on certain important criteria for the home. It should be low maintenance, a space that makes you feel at ease and helps you relax after a day’s work, and possess a timeless design that would still be appealing 10 years on. Their two dogs, Paisley and Mansa, also had opinions.
“Paisley told an animal communicator that she wanted floors that were less slippery. Mansa just wanted me to play fetch with him,” shares Samuel. In particular, Pearlynn wanted him to devise a way to keep the dogs away from the main door and out of the kitchen.
$115,000 Renovation Cost
The entire flat was overhauled to a cost of about $80,000, plus an additional $35,000 for the furnishings. Almost every non-load bearing wall was hacked and all the finishes were replaced except for the living room and bedroom floors.
Breakfast Bar Design
To the left of the main entrance, a new breakfast bar and shoe cabinet demarcates the entrance foyer and separates it from the kitchen. A sliding door at the end allows the entrance foyer to be closed off to prevent the dogs from running out of the house. The same sliding door, when moved to the opposite side, can also enclose the kitchen.
Kitchen Design
The kitchen lies on the other side of the breakfast bar. Its entrance now faces the dining and living areas instead of the foyer. It has been combined with the yard and the galley style layout allows some of the natural light from the window at one end of the laundry area to penetrate all the way across the breakfast bar to the entrance foyer.
Some of the thoughtfully designed features in the kitchen include a vertical utensil cabinet, hide-away laundry sink, dedicated housing for the robot vacuum cleaner and self-flushing dog toilet.
Dining Room Design
The dining room is right beside the balcony decked with stained recycled chengal wood. A row of built-in carpentry occupies the backwall, including shelves and cabinets to house Samuel’s aquascape aquarium and Pearlynn’s Sylvanian Family collection.
Having built it with their own hands, the 2m x 1m dining table made of solid black walnut planks is the couple’s pride and joy. It also doubles up as Samuel’s worktable when he is aquascaping.
Living Room Design
One of the bedrooms has been converted into the new living room. Samuel kept the design simple, but paid extra attention to the lighting concept to create a cosy ambience and to avoid the glare from the windows from reflecting off the television.
Beside the living room, the walkway connecting the household shelter, common bathroom and master bedroom has been designed as a feature wall that conceals the three doors. Using a framing design, the resulting shadows cast by the frames hide the seams for the doors in plain sight.
Study Area
The walls between the master bedroom and adjacent bedroom were hacked, then re-partitioned using new carpentry incorporating full-height, L-shaped wardrobes and a study nook with a doggy door. A window above the study desk is roughly aligned with the external window of the bedroom next door. This creates a layering of spaces while offering a view out of, and allowing natural light into, the study area.
Master Bedroom Design
The placement of the carpentry results in a larger master bedroom and a smaller second bedroom.
More importantly, this strategy allows the latter to be reinstated as a bedroom for when the couple have a child. In the meantime, this second bedroom serves as a flexible space to exercise, play mahjong, or house guests by installing a murphy bed.
Master Bathroom Design
Samuel adopted a more experimental approach for the master bathroom, fitting it out with large format tiles, a wall hung WC, bathtub, concealed shower mixer and a large, His and Hers basin that are not commonly found in HDB flats. For the common bathroom, he designed a double-faced wall incorporating niches on both sides. He went with a Wood Plastic Composite (WPC) material for the bathroom carpentry as it is waterproof and can be hosed down without worries, making cleaning a breeze.
Samuel and Pearlynn moved into their new home in November 2023 after a 10-week renovation. Being a designer himself, he admits to constantly making changes to improve the design even during the renovation process as he watched the space evolve.
As a contractor, he understands the underlying principles of how things are built, which then enables him to think out of the box and bend the rules to achieve more interesting designs or designs that may otherwise appear impossible or too expensive. “Working on my own home gives me the freedom to experiment with riskier ideas and features that I would otherwise never put in my clients’ homes,” he points out.