Inspirations: The minimalist 5 room HDB

Generally the minimalist theme is mis-interpreted as an “all-white” theme in Singapore. Since I am no expert to expound on the topic, I’ll leave you to read the wikipedia definition of minimalism HERE and move on to the HDB that I wanna feature.

So far, it is the best execution of a minimalist HDB interior that I’ve seen. This was featured in Habitus Living as “The Singapore Apartment” last year and recently again in Home & Decor as ‘Back to Basics‘. Quite interesting to see the changes and how the owner has since added more furnishings to soften the look. Not quite sure if I really like the extra clutter but I do recognize quite a few of the new items from the stores I go to. 🙂 Then again, understand that H&D tends to ‘dress up’ the apartments they feature so it may not be the owner’s stuff after all. I also find interesting that the difference in color tone/saturation for the photos taken by the owner and H&D makes such a big difference to the ‘feel’ of the apartment. By the way, for the benefit of foreign readers, HDB stands for “Housing & Development Board” responsible to construct public housing for 85% of the population in Singapore.

From Habitus Living:

From Home & Decor:

Before pic and HDB exterior:

When I first saw the images, I was frankly intrigued and rather taken with how the apartment was done up. So I went to look for the possible floor plan to examine the HDB apartment layout. This is not the exact plan, but similar to it. You can see that one room was hacked and converted to the open study, and the walls that couldn’t be hacked was converted into the TV pillar. Wirings were mainly ran and hidden along the ceiling coves:

On closer examination, I probably can’t live without fans or air conditioning (which is partly why you don’t see any trunking or ducting anywhere in the apartment), and the epoxy flooring may be hard to maintain (plus I’ll worry about slippery floors) but visually it’s such a delight. The apartment is designed by the owner who is architect trained btw. Desmond Ong did up the place for $70k renovation and $10k in furnishings as reported by H&D.

I’ll leave you to enjoy the other pics: