Located near Singapore’s east coast, the house is set in suburban sea of red-tiled pitched rooves in a mix of classical and modern pastiche.
The design brief was plain and simple: the client wanted something vastly different from this suburban Singapore formula, to maximize the floor space ratio and have enough parking for his nine precious automobiles.
“The client,” recalls Mercurio Design Lab’s Managing Director Massimo Mercurio, “looked around the studio and said he wanted something ‘cool’ and saw a model of a Lamborghini. I said I could do something better than that, something that looks like a starship.”
While the house certainly does resemble a spaceship which has just landed, the development of the formal concept was actually less a descriptive exercise and more an exploration of abstract geometries triggered by the form of the Lamborghini. “Lambda,” says Mercurio, “is a geometrical description of space.”
Sprawling an impressive total area of 14,000sqft., the core of the house inside is the dining hall which rises over two storeys and is overlooked by a second storey gallery. The interiors contain many custom-designed elements which serve to unify the interior and the exterior in an integrated design scheme.
The dining table is a ten-metre-long monolith of white quartz. The customized bar counter with its travertine-clad face seems to grow out of the floor, while the triangulated legs of the pool table are another reference to the house’s outer form.
The interiors are notable for their space and opulence. On the second storey, there are two double-height symmetrical bedrooms of equal size, differentiated by their palettes ─ one in classical beige tones, the other in silver and contrasting red. The master bathroom is equally opulent with a large tiger onyx countertop and a Jacuzzi bath tub in the centre of the room.
Photo: Mercurio Design Lab