24/07/2026
In 1995, we were asked to turn a dilapidated shophouse on Emerald Hill Road into a home. The typology is a beautiful one, but it had its challenges: narrow street frontages and deep plans meant the centre of the house was dark, its potential concealed behind decades of partitions and patched-over floors.
We removed them, and what remained was a single tall volume, its rough brick party walls catching light through gaps in the broken rooftiles above — space that had always been inherent in the form, simply hidden by later additions. Rather than restore around that discovery, we built into it, inserting a smooth sandstone box that sits free of the old party walls and houses the new rooms, while the original structure stays legible around it. The old and the new were kept distinct rather than blended, so the contrast between them remains part of how the house is experienced.
Completed in 1998, the project was one of the first on Emerald Hill to treat the interior as its own piece of architecture rather than as a backdrop for a restored facade, and it was featured not long after in The Architectural Review (). Swipe through to see the article.
Almost thirty years later, the house has had a fresh chapter, with its surfaces and details reworked for a new season of life by Studio Terre (). The spatial concept underneath hasn't changed, and it's still doing the work it was designed to do, holding the tension between old and new that has defined the house since 1998.
