Some of the most charged spaces in a city are the ones standing empty.
Every year, our studio adopts a building nobody asked us to touch. No client, no brief, no budget — only a landmark that has gone quiet, and a single question: what could this become if heritage were treated as a beginning rather than a relic? We call them adopted projects, and they are how we stay ahead of the brief instead of waiting for it.
It is also how the studio grows. As part of an annual design initiative, every designer on the team is invited to contribute freely, challenge convention and test bold ideas without the constraints of a commercial programme. The adopted project becomes a platform for experimentation and professional growth — a way to keep our thinking fresh, our craft sharp, and our perspective ahead of where the industry is heading.
Our most recent adoption is Tanjong Pagar Railway Station — a 1932 landmark of soaring halls, travertine and allegorical reliefs, its platforms long silent. We reimagined it as a Young Office Hub: collaborative workspaces beneath the original vaulted ceilings, lifestyle amenities threaded through the concourse, community spaces where ticket halls once stood, and a café set inside a restored railway carriage on the old tracks. The objective was to show how a heritage landmark can support entrepreneurship, collaboration, dining and cultural life — without erasing the very thing that makes it worth keeping.
Heritage is not something to preserve under glass. It is something to keep using.
The discipline is adaptive reuse: conserve what carries memory — the façade, the reliefs, the structural rhythm — and insert the new lightly and reversibly, always in dialogue with the old. Six principles guided the study:
Warm timber and biophilic planting soften the civic scale; layered light returns drama to halls built for arrival and departure. A conservatory-style dining hall threads greenery through the old platforms, while a boutique-retail concept brings a bold, contemporary edge against the heritage backdrop — proof that the new and the old can share one roof and make each other sharper.
We do not wait for opportunities to innovate — we create them. Each adopted project sharpens how we think for paying clients: bolder concepts, tested freely, then carried into the work with confidence. To give a forgotten place new life is, in the end, the purest version of what we do everywhere — refining space, and designing the unexpected.
An independent conceptual design study by The Design Artistry Pte. Ltd., for portfolio and design-exploration purposes only — not commissioned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the property owner, the Singapore Land Authority, or any government agency.
Whether it is a single room or an entire estate, the conversation begins the same way — with how you want to live. Share your space and we will show you what it could become.
Consultancy · Interior · Project Mgmt
Singapore & countries around the world
