Learnings from Singapore
My husband and I have spent some time in Singapore over the past few years - never long enough, but enough to come home restless. The city does things to you. It is dense and green and deliberate in a way Auckland is not, and I kept finding myself stopping mid-street to look at something and think: why don't we do that here?
Four things stuck with me. Not all of them are directly transferable - Singapore has land scarcity that makes our problems look luxurious by comparison - but the thinking behind them is.
01 - THE THRESHOLD IS TREATED AS ARCHITECTURE
In Singapore, the gap between public and private is taken seriously as a designed space. The sheltered five-foot way - the covered walkway that runs along the front of shophouses - is built into every terraced building by civic mandate. But it's not just civic infrastructure. Homeowners treat it as an extension of the interior: a planted buffer, a transition zone, somewhere to arrive before you arrive.
Auckland does almost none of this. We build to the boundary or we build back from it with a strip of lawn that does nothing. The entry sequence - the way a house receives you - tends to be an afterthought. What Singapore reminded me is that the threshold is where the relationship between a home and its street begins. It deserves as much thought as the rooms inside.
02 - GREENERY IS STRUCTURAL, NOT DECORATIVE
Singapore has a greening mandate - buildings are required to replace at ground level whatever vegetation was displaced by the footprint. In practice this means planted terraces, sky gardens, vertical green walls and canopy trees integrated into the building envelope from day one. It is not an add-on. The planting is part of the architecture.
In Auckland we are slowly getting there - the Unitary Plan now encourages this - but we still treat landscaping as the last line item and the first to be cut. I came back thinking about how differently a house reads when the green is considered from the beginning: how much cooler, quieter and more alive it feels. For character homes especially, where the garden was always part of the composition, this feels like a return to something we already knew.
03 - SMALL SITES ARE PLANNED WITH EXTRAORDINARY CARE
Land in Singapore is finite in a way that makes Auckland's intensification debates seem abstract. The result is a culture of spatial intelligence that is genuinely impressive - homes that feel generous at 150m², apartments where every centimetre has been considered, buildings that stack program vertically without feeling compressed.
What I took from this is not a lesson in minimalism but in precision. Every decision earns its place. The ceiling height, the window position, the built-in storage - none of it is accidental. This is the approach I try to bring to Auckland renovations, particularly villas, where the existing footprint is often fixed and the brief is to find the space that is already there. Singapore just does it at a citywide scale.
04 - CLIMATE IS TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS A DESIGN DRIVER
Singapore sits on the equator. The climate is not mild, it is relentless - 30 degrees and humid year round. The architecture has adapted: deep overhangs, cross-ventilation, shaded outdoor rooms, high ceilings, materials that don't retain heat. Passive cooling is not a sustainability gesture, it is the baseline. The building is designed around the weather because the weather leaves no choice.
Auckland is temperate by comparison, but we underuse our climate as a design tool. We build houses that rely on mechanical heating for six months of the year because we haven't oriented them properly, or glazed the wrong elevation, or detailed the eaves without thinking about the winter sun angle. Singapore reminded me that climate-responsive design doesn't require a tropical setting. It requires the discipline to let the site conditions lead.
I came back to Auckland wanting to look at the city differently - at the laneways and the verandahs and the old villa front porches and think about what we were trying to do, once, before we stopped. Some of it we can return to. Some of it we can borrow. Most of it just requires slowing down long enough to notice what is already there.
