In a Park, a renovated apartment by L Architects, uses a rare local brick to organise everyday domestic life through material and spatial intervention
Photography by Jovian Lim
In the northeast of Singapore, L Architects has transformed a modest three-bedroom apartment into a domestic interior that borrows its logic from the city’s public parks. The project, titled In a Park, was commissioned by a horticulturist whose growing plant collection had begun to exceed the limits of his home.
Like many households during the pandemic, his interest in gardening had intensified at first as a temporary pursuit, then gradually settled into a longer-term way of life. The apartment, however, was not designed to accommodate his new interest.
‘The household had outgrown the space,’ the architects note. More specifically, the existing layout restricted not only where plants could be placed, but how they could be experienced. As the client put it during early discussions, although he lived with plants, he did not ‘wake up to them.’ That observation became the starting point for the project.
Photography by Jovian Lim
Rather than treating greenery as decoration, the design team proposed a more integrated approach: to understand the apartment as a kind of interior park, where planting, circulation and daily routines overlap. In developing this idea, they turned to Singapore’s older public parks as a reference point, and in particular to a material closely associated with them.
The double-bullnose brick, once commonly used in benches, planters and pathways, has largely disappeared from contemporary construction. In the course of sourcing, the architects discovered that local production had ceased entirely. Only 571 bricks remained in a factory’s inventory, offered as a final batch, so their limited number inspired the design from the outset.
In the apartment, the brick is introduced throughout as a key design element. Its rounded profile softens transitions and allows for gentle curvature, replacing rigid partitions with more fluid boundaries. A freestanding wall of tessellated brick separates the study from the living area, while a curved bench extends between study and dining spaces, functioning as a shared edge that can be occupied from either side.
Photography by Jovian Lim
These interventions reorganise the apartment, replacing several discrete rooms with a more open plan articulated by smaller nooks and corners, with planting integrated throughout. The result is a domestic interior in which plants are built into the architecture rather than added as decoration.
In In a Park, L Architects suggests that domestic transformation need not rely on technological novelty or formal excess, but can emerge through the careful use of familiar materials. The project proposes a way of living with plants in the city that is integrated into the home, bringing certain qualities of public space into the domestic interior.
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