In High-Rise Happy Singapore, a Luxury Single-Family Home Bucks the Trend

A single-family home is the exception to the rule in high-rise Singapore, where most of the city-state’s 5.5 million residents live in apartments. So when it came time for Mark Tan and Stella Gwee to trade in their starter bungalow for something larger and grander, they decided to stay put, tear down and begin again on their rare 1/10th-acre lot.

In 2009, Tan, now 48, and Gwee, 46, paid 2.2 million Singapore dollars, or about US$1.6 million, for their original 1,500-square-foot house, located in a single-family enclave in Singapore’s North-East region. The couple then spent $2.6 million to replace the three-bedroom, semidetached structure, built in a Balinese-fusion style, with a four-story, seven-bedroom brick house that combines Asian and Western elements across 7,400 square feet.

In all, Tan and Gwee have invested just over $4.2 million in their new home. Multi-bedroom Singapore homes of a similar size could sell now for twice that.

The couple—Gwee works with her husband, a local entrepreneur—began demolition in 2020, relocating with their two children, Xavier, now 17, and Andrea, 13, to a nearby rental for the two years of construction. The family, along with dogs Furry and Brownie, moved into the finished house in early 2022.

The new home’s standout feature is a landscaped vertical courtyard, rising nearly 40 feet. “A lot of Singaporeans won’t sacrifice the space to build a courtyard like this,” says Tan, a Singapore native, who grew up nearby.

Enclosed by a skylight, the space is outfitted at the top with a large industrial fan 8 feet in diameter that is powerful enough to ventilate a factory floor. Made by Southern California’s MacroAir, the fan helps the family keep cool in Singapore’s year-round tropical weather. It is part of a $74,000 climate-control system that allows every room individual air-conditioning units.

The flora-rich courtyard, featuring an indoor koi pond and fronted by an open-air outdoor swimming pool, opens to the street at its base between the pool and the pond. The house can be closed off and revert entirely to air conditioning on especially hot days.

The open-plan first floor includes living and dining areas, and has space enough for a Steinway piano for music student Andrea. The second floor is given over to a mahjong room that doubles as a guest bedroom and a study. The bedrooms are on the third floor. The fourth floor serves as a penthouse recreation room for the kids and their friends.

The elevator makes for easy transitions, but Tan says his health-conscious wife takes the stairs.

Windows and terraces orient the house around the courtyard. Designing an expansive vertical courtyard was a challenge, says the couple’s architect Han Loke Kwang, principal in Singapore’s HYLA Architects, which specializes in upscale single-family projects (or landed properties, as locals call them). Immense vertical spaces like this are seen in commercial structures but are unusual in a residential setting, says Han.

The goal in the Tan-Gwee home, he says, was “to make sure the scale of the courtyard wasn’t overwhelming.”

Foliage—chosen to flourish in the courtyard’s shaded conditions and kept fresh with an elaborate irrigation system—and the koi pond help ornament the space. The pond gives the first floor a waterfront feel.

The couple spent $148,000 on the pool and pond areas. Tan filled the pond with $59,000 worth of top-dwelling adult koi, mostly imported from Japan, and several bottom-dwelling freshwater stingrays, costing $22,000.

Singapore, which is smaller than Los Angeles County, is a blending of cultures, bringing together East Asian, South Asian and European influences. The Tan-Gwee home has a decidedly cosmopolitan flair, combining Italian designer furniture, British and Canadian lighting, kitchen appliances from Germany’s Miele, and bathroom details inspired by vacations in Dubai and the Maldives.

The fortresslike facade, which preserves the privacy of the home, is in keeping with Asian residential models, says Han.

Many of Han’s clients have two kitchens—an open area for Western-style cooking and a closed-off Asian-style cooking space with wok stations, requiring extra ventilation. While finishing the house, Tan and Gwee decided to forgo the planned Asian kitchen, converting it into a kitchen terrace equipped with an $11,000 barbecue.

Back inside, the kitchen was outfitted with a steam oven, two conventional ovens of different sizes and a built-in Miele coffee machine.

These are booming times in Singapore. The city-state now has a per capita GDP of more than $91,000, higher than anywhere else in Asia and one of the world’s strongest residential markets.

Overall residential real-estate prices rose 7.5% between the second quarters of 2022 and 2023, with those of landed residences increasing by 9.4% in the same period, says Nicholas Keong, senior director of Knight Frank’s Singapore affiliate. Also, Singapore came in first in Knight Frank’s Prime Global Rental Index—far exceeding London, New York, Monaco and Tokyo—with rent prices rising 28% in 2022.

The couple seem to have exhausted their wish list. When you have everything from three ovens to a stingray budget, there isn’t much left. What about a home spa? “No sauna here,” counters Tan, who relies on the primary bedroom’s three air conditioners to maintain comfort. “It’s already too hot in Singapore.”

OTHER COSTS

Foundation and framing: $589,400

Electrical work: $148,000

Designer Lighting: $74,000

Elevator: $88,400

Kitchen (including appliances): $222,000

Bathrooms (7): 148,000

Brickwork/masonry: $222,000

Glazing, including windows and sliding glass doors: $222,000

Landscaping, including indoor plants and irrigation: $73,700

The most 2026 element of the latest screen adaptation of 1847’s hottest novel, “Wuthering Heights,” is the scene in which Heathcliff repeatedly asks the young lady he’s undressing, “Do you want me to stop?” even as she writhes with lust, indicating an affirmative response is unlikely.

Previously understood as a notorious brute even by 19th-century standards, Heathcliff now exhibits signs of having earned perfect grades in today’s campus training modules.

There’s also a reference to septicemia, which is writer-director Emerald Fennell’s perhaps too-technical stab at explaining the nonspecific Victorian disease that afflicts one character.

Mostly, however, Ms. Fennell has done an admirable job of not modernising a dark and moody romance. If most of today’s filmmakers crave hearing, “This is not your mother’s (fill in the blank)” when adapting classic material, this pretty much is your mother’s “Wuthering Heights,” or at least one she will recognise.

Catherine Earnshaw, played with great soapy gusto by Margot Robbie, is still the same judgment-impaired social-climbing drama queen as ever, and Ms. Fennell frequently associates her with a rich, decadent red—the colour of the bordello—to suggest that she has unwisely traded her body for riches.

Ms. Fennell, who won an Oscar for writing the feminist parable “Promising Young Woman,” doesn’t bother suggesting that Catherine is a victim of society’s impossible expectations for women, which allows her to focus on the core story without intrusive mutters of disapproval for 19th-century mores.

The plot is a template for every Harlequin romance about a woman caught between a sexy beast and a languid but wealthy wimp.

Catherine, who lives with her frequently drunken father (Martin Clunes) on a struggling Yorkshire estate called Wuthering Heights, grows up with a wild, apparently orphaned boy adopted by her father after being found hapless in the street.

The boy at first doesn’t even talk, and seems to have no name, so Catherine calls him Heathcliff. As an adult, he is played by Jacob Elordi , an excellent match for Ms. Robbie, both in comeliness and star power.

The pair grow up best friends and even sleep in the same bed. The desperate attraction between them is evident to both, but Catherine has her sights set on a higher-status mate than this mere stable boy.

After much figurative and literal peering over the walls of the posh neighbouring estate, Thrushcross Grange, she twists an ankle and becomes a six-week houseguest of the gentleman who owns it, the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). He lives with his ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). Heathcliff, in agony, moves away without notice while Catherine marries Edgar.

Ms. Fennell has greatly streamlined the complicated plot of Emily Brontë’s novel, eliminating the framing device, the supernatural element, several peripheral figures and a second generation of characters.

Other adaptations have made similar excisions, and yet the latest version is luxuriantly long, fully half an hour longer than the much-loved 1939 film by William Wyler that starred Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven.

Ms. Fennell is a millennial who might have been expected to make the material slick, hip or at least fast; she has done none of that.

The story is a slow burn, as it should be, an extended sonata of moaning winds, crackling storms, smouldering glances and heaving bosoms. When you’ve got two actors as luminous as Ms. Robbie and Mr. Elordi, you don’t need them to say clever things, and they don’t.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

Catherine essentially becomes a character in a Sofia Coppola movie who grows increasingly trapped and anguished in proportion to her cosseting. A slate of songs by Charli XCX captures Catherine’s tragic self-absorption without seeming jarringly modern.

The movie is very much aimed at female viewers, and Heathcliff (whose bare-chested form Ms. Fennell’s camera adoringly takes in) is less robustly drawn than in some previous iterations, driven mainly by carnal lust rather than a more all-encompassing rage.

Olivier’s demonic anger at the world came through clearly, whereas Mr. Elordi’s Heathcliff seems as though he’d be content to simply peel away Catherine from Edgar. And though Nelly (Hong Chau), Catherine’s maid and confidante, plays an essential role in developments, her character remains a bit frustratingly hazy.

Still, in the wake of adaptations such as 2012’s “Anna Karenina,” with Keira Knightley , and 2013’s “The Great Gatsby,” with Leonardo DiCaprio, that were all sizzle and flash, “Wuthering Heights” is a worthy throwback.

Deeply felt longing is its own kind of sizzle.

In High-Rise Happy Singapore, a Luxury Single-Family Home Bucks the Trend

A local couple tore down their bungalow to create a four-story, seven-bedroom house for a total cost of $4.2 million

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star in an adaptation of the classic novel that respects the romance’s slow burn.