Chasing the Light in Tiong Bahru

The apartment sits on the second floor of a pre-war block off Yong Siak Street, in one of the few corners of Tiong Bahru where the original 1930s windows were never swapped out for aluminium. Atelier North kept them. Clara Ng, who led the project, says the decision set the tone for everything that followed: if the windows were staying, the rest of the apartment had to be built around what light they let in.

• The team tracked daylight for two weeks before touching the floor plan.
• The kitchen was moved to sit inside the strongest band of afternoon sun.
• Lime plaster and unlacquered oak were chosen to change appearance with the light, not resist it.

Tracking the sun before the floor plan

That meant tracking the sun before touching a single wall. The team spent two weeks with a camera propped in the living room, photographing the same corner every hour from seven in the morning to six at night. The resulting sequence showed a band of light that moved across the floor and up the far wall, landing differently depending on the season. The kitchen was moved to sit inside that band. The bedroom, which gets almost no direct light, was left alone and treated instead with warm, low lighting fixtures that mimic the color temperature of the golden hour it never really gets.

Materials chosen to change, not stay fixed

Materials followed the same logic. Lime plaster, troweled by hand across the main living wall, catches raking light in a way that flat paint does not, so the wall looks slightly different by 10am than it does at 4pm. Oak flooring runs through in wide, unlacquered boards that will darken with sun exposure over the coming years, something Ng says she is planning for rather than trying to prevent.

The result is an apartment that photographs well but was never really designed for photographs. Ng points out that most of its best moments happen at times a camera crew would never be scheduled for: early morning, when the light first clears the building opposite, or late afternoon, when it turns orange against the plaster. "You can't really schedule a shoot around 4:40pm on a Tuesday," she says. "But that's when this apartment is at its best."