A “Slightly” Eclectic Singapore Apartment Shows How to Be Cozy Without “Overly Decorated”
Name: Serene; husband, Jude; and daughter, Sophie
Location: Singapore
Type of home: Apartment
Size: 1,216 square feet
Years lived in: 9 months, owned
Tell us a little (or a lot) about your home and the people who live there: Our home doesn’t really have a theme or concept — we had brought over most of the furniture from our previous apartment and so our guiding principle was to just make sure everything fit in the new place and that it still felt like WE live in it. Hence the slight eclecticism.
We intentionally didn’t want it to feel overly decorated or curated, and it was important to us that this felt like home, and not some interior decorator’s fever dream. So a lot of what made our old flat home is very much a part of this one too — my husband’s vinyl collection, our books, knickknacks we’ve collected over the years, and our posters and art prints that have traveled across oceans and four homes with us, etc.
Because it’s important that our home reflects the journey(s) we’ve taken as a family, everything you see was slowly collected over the almost two decades we’ve been together, especially our wall art. Every piece on the wall contains a memory of either a place, a time, or an experience we don’t want to forget.
Two maps illustrated by Libby VanderPloeg are particularly meaningful: one of Michigan, and the other of San Francisco. My husband spends more than half the year working in San Francisco and so it was important for us to bring a bit of our second home into this one. And we went to graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for close to 10 years, so when Libby put this map up for sale as well, we grabbed it immediately. Every time I walk past these two maps, they make me smile.
Describe your home’s style in 5 words or fewer: Eclectic, layered, personal.
What is your favorite room and why? I love our living/dining room. We get lots of natural light and fresh air and even though we have a home office, I often like doing work outside just to be in that space.
Our apartment has what might first strike you as an odd floor plan, with lots of unconventional angles and corners. But I’ve grown to love it — especially at different times of the day when the light bounces off the various corners of the main living space and creates these interesting swooping shadows and lines. It’s fantastic.
What’s the last thing you bought (or found!) for your home? The thing I agonized over the most was lighting, and for a long time I yearned for the Verner Panton Flowerpot pendant lamps from &Tradition. But it felt like too much of a splurge and I had almost resigned myself to giving them up. And then I found a dealer who was willing to sell their last two display pieces at a discount. I was overjoyed. They now hang by our bedsides.
Any advice for creating a home you love? Fill it with memories. Don’t worry if things don’t match or if they feel old-fashioned or unstylish. I still have an old patchwork quilt blanket that my aunt made years ago and it’s now draped over a couch we had bought secondhand when we first moved back from Michigan, which sits next to a vintage Noguchi coffee table that a friend had helped us source. We also have a couple of “coffee-shop chairs” that were a dime a dozen in many Singapore coffee shops in the ’70s and ’80s, which were a gift from my husband’s mom. We now use them as our bedside “tables” just below the mid-century flowerpot lamps. None of these things look like they would “go together,” but they do to us, because they mean something to us.
This submission’s responses and photos were edited for length/size and clarity.
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