Green Grass of Home

THERE ARE TERRACE houses and houses with terraces, but deep in the heart of Siglap stands a terrace house with terraces - and plants, lots of plants.

Dealing with the constraints of building a house on a narrow strip of land wedged between two single-storey homes is not uncommon in land-scarce Singapore, but architect Carl Lim faced an additional challenge. Owner Allan Loh spent much of his life in homes with green environments, and he voiced a desire "to live in a house full of trees and shrubs", with views of greenery from every room.

The solution was to build a multi-layered home, conceived as a chest of drawers such that the 'drawers' (planter boxes in this case) look like they have been pulled open to achieve a terraced effect, not unlike a layered wedding cake. The ground-floor footprint measures just 6m wide by 21m long, with each of two upper-level interiors smaller in area than the level below. Still, the finished home had space enough to fit five bedrooms, including an attic room that sits like a shiny glass box atop the structure - the 'cherry' on the cake, as it were.