In traditional Italian architecture the main floor of the house was located on the 2nd floor and called the “piano nobile” – the noble floor.

In this project we were confronted with a context that was extremely dense (neighbours only 4 metres away) without the possibility of creating privacy through boundary walls.

Our solution was to elevate the living/dining room areas to the 2nd floor, along with the swimming pool, thereby creating privacy from the road and the beach, and enhancing the views out over the ocean.

In order to avoid the copycat structures prevalent in Sentosa (the stringent design guidelines required a pitched roof, along with a host of other highly prescriptive design parameters) we created a single architectural entity, called the “wrap”.

This continuous surface starts out as the floor of the “piano nobile”, wraps vertically to create an opaque surface towards the street and finally ends up in a double-pitch roof, satisfying the regulatory guidelines without literally resorting to a traditional roof architecture.