Architect Kerry Hill Restores a Singapore Home

This article originally appeared in the January 2007 issue of Architectural Digest.

Space is everything to me," says Adrian Zecha, who believes he has found the ultimate house—"the most comfortable house I've ever lived in"—in Singapore. Zecha, the driving force and vision behind Amanresorts, hotels that are regarded as the last word in comfort and luxury, elaborates: "Space is one of the most important dimensions of the thing called luxury," he says. "Comfort, too, but emotional comfort is only possible with space."

This paragon of a supremely habitable house is known in Singapore and Malaysia as a black and white, a huge colonial bungalow. Single family houses of few but enormous rooms, they tended to be built in clusters in areas called parks—an early form of the gated community—for the use of expatriate civil servants, especially those on the higher rungs of the colonial ladder.

In the days before air-conditioning, black and whites were sought after for their size and their coolness as well as for the status that they implied.

Designed by architects from the colonial land office in Britain, the houses were mostly "put up in the 1930s and are incredibly well built, with cross-ventilation all around," says Zecha. "They fit very well into the environment, too." Since they took up so much space, many were torn down. While some 240 remain in Singapore, only 100 or so are privately owned.

When Zecha and his wife, Bebe, decided to move to Singapore from what had been the base of business operations in Hong Kong, they looked for a house with the largest possible garden. A black and white on a two-acre plot happened to be available. In the density of Singapore, this was something like finding Versailles. But the house was in poor shape. "We had to bring it back to where it was," says Zecha, who hired local architect Kerry Hill to restore the interiors.

"These houses are a marvelous lesson in how to build in the tropics," says Hill, who lives in a black and white himself. "We rarely design interiors alone, so for us, this was an unusual situation prompted by a rare client and a house with great bones."

Though the rooms are spacious, there are only two bedrooms in the house. "Very few apartments have rooms this size," Zecha says. "Our ceilingsare 14 to 16 feet high." The intention was not merely to bring this beautiful house back to its former glory but also to create areas for the Zechas' art collection, which is a considerable accumulation of 50 years of travel and connoisseurship.

Having begun his career as a publisher—he has worked in newspapers, books and magazines in Singapore and Hong Kong—Zecha founded the art magazine Orientations in 1970 and has never ceased to add to his collection of Asian paintings and sculpture. He is an enthusiast and wide-ranging in his taste. The notion of choosing a favorite piece makes him laugh—he has lots of favorites—though he adds, "The Chinese say, Reduce your collection to one piece.' "

"You have to live with pieces," he says. "The best thing is to switch them around. We take ours out of storage from time to time, as the Japanese do, taking a piece from the treasure room—a new vase, a new scroll or whatever."

He seeks the forte of each culture. "The Japanese are greatest in lacquerware," he explains. "Sculpture is great in India and also among the Khmer. Japanese and Korean screens are fabulous, and in China, porcelain and paintings. And you can find fantastic things in the Philippines—woodwork most of all, some of it Spanish or indigenous."

The best places to buy Oriental art are Bangkok and Hong Kong, he says. "Even on a business trip, if I have time, I gravitate toward antiques shops. If something hits my eye, I buy it."

The notion of space and lightis always on his mind. Born in 1933 in West Java, Zecha lived with his grandfather before World War II and the nightmare of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. The family business was tea, and the land was ideal. "The best tea grows above 4,000 feet," he notes.

"I think back to my grandfather," Zecha says. "He lived in spaces far greater than myfather did. And my father lived in spaces greater than mine. The world is getting smaller."

His black-and-white house perhaps represents a childhood ideal, for it flourished in the colonial world he knew as a boy. It is the embodiment of everything Zecha admires in a living space. Reflecting on his art collection, he says, "It all goes together if you do it in a disciplined way." Reflecting on his house, he remarks, "You can't improve on it."