To reach the entry of Minh Le Tien and Emylia Safian’s Singapore home, you must wend your way through their front garden. A narrow path almost concealed by shrubs and small trees, with butterflies flitting into view and small, white flowers dotting curtains of greenery, sets the tone for the untamed spaces inside.

The couple—Minh works in finance and Emylia is an art therapist and educator—had lived in a single-story house on the same plot for nearly a decade. “It was quite hot and stuffy, so we turned on the air-conditioning all the time,” says Emylia. “One day, the air-conditioning system broke down, so we started opening windows and using a standing fan.” The nights were bearable, but stifling days revealed the home’s lack of air circulation. As the structure aged and started to leak, they reached out to architect Ling Hao, whose practice is known for buildings that harmonize with the region’s tropical climate and diverse flora.

In their design brief, the couple asked for “a house that breathes naturally,” with spaces that are naturally ventilated and varied: cold and warm, light and dark, raw and crafted, private and public, playful and serious, strong and delicate.

The expanded 2,680-square-foot home embraces these contrasts with a raw concrete shell that opens to the elements. There are no glass windows. Instead, large voids slice through the building to bring in daylight and cooling breezes, and curtains of greenery sprout from inset planters. Hao kept some of the walls around the rear courtyard while extending the eaves for shade and opening the plan to promote cross ventilation.

The house comprises two split-level stories and a small mezzanine. Steel staircases with open treads ascend from the ground-floor common areas past rooms loosely demarcated by timber platforms and shifts in floor height. Furnishings sit in ad hoc arrangements. The mezzanine, the home’s upper level, leads to a wild rooftop garden. The couple now live without air-conditioning—an anomaly in tropical Singapore.

“The house shelters, but weather is still part of the everyday,” says Hao. “Quiet moments change fast without one knowing. The rain comes, and there is an instinct to do something—maybe move the towels? But there are no windows or doors to close.”

“We’ve never experienced another house like this—but why not? We embraced Ling Hao’s imagination wholeheartedly,” says Emylia. “We now want to live with ecological consciousness, and we learn every day by connecting with the plants, earth, and creatures that invite themselves to visit or live with us.”

Emylia grows and harvests passion fruit and aloe vera, among other plants, and the couple cultivate herbs for medicinal pastes and condiments. In the past they’ve used native pandan to make kaya jam, kueh (traditional Malay confections), and jamu (traditional Indonesian herbal drinks); wild betel for Vietnamese and Malay dishes; mulberry for medicinal concoctions; and wood sorrel for salads and garnishes.

“We compost everything,” adds Minh. “Kitchen and garden waste all goes back to the soil. It’s a symbiotic process—this human-plant relationship.”

Around the house, the vicissitudes of nature govern the couple’s waking moments. “Sunlight on a particular spot in the kitchen is our clock to indicate it’s lunchtime, and the songs of birds wake us up in the mornings and accompany us throughout the day,” says Emylia. “Parakeets come to enjoy the roof’s wild petai plants, and we can’t sleep in past seven-thirty because they can get quite excited and loud.

“The evolving material state of the house and also immaterial conditions like temperature, light, humidity, and mood make us continually adapt and adjust,” she explains. “I trust that the environment will support me in this little home that is supported by it.”

“We wanted a retreat-like space to immerse ourselves in that resembled the places we like to travel to—natural, a little remote, peaceful.”
—Minh Le Tien, resident

The couple initially considered adding solar panels to offset their energy use, but they ultimately chose natural solutions. “We have an entire green roof—and walls,” says Minh. “Our utility bills are very low.”

When he’s not gardening, Minh spends most of his time on the mezzanine, where his office is, shielded from the street by a layer of plants. “I get an interior view of the second floor, as well as a long-distance vista of the city,” he says. Emylia calls it his “cave” because of the sloped roof. “There is a desk, but he prefers to sit cross-legged on the floor,” she says.

Meanwhile, she finds peace in the ground-floor kitchen. “The kitchen offers a sensorial experience at all levels. It’s generous not just in terms of physical space, but it nourishes me psychologically, too,” she says. “These days, I play with wild yeast and fermentation, which teaches me to slow down, work with the climate, rest, let go, and accept.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Linghao Architects

Builder: Coreform Builder Pte Ltd

Landscape Design: Stable Unstable

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