A Dual-Key Singapore Apartment Unified Into a Multigenerational Family Home.

In Singapore’s condominium market, the dual-key apartment is a landlord’s instrument — a larger residence and a smaller studio sharing a single front door, each configured to be leased independently. Ascend Design has been asked to undo one. Singapore-based practice and lead designer Wei Zheng took a 120-square-metre dual-key unit and reconfigured it as a three-bedroom home for a couple, their young child, and the child’s grandparents — a single household, but one that preserves the autonomy the original plan promised.

The first move was structural. The partition wall between the two units came down to its services, and the plan was redrawn around a continuous living, dining and kitchen volume that now stretches the full length of the apartment. The two former entries were consolidated into one. Plumbing risers — fixed by the building’s core — set the position of the three bathrooms; the bedrooms were then arranged around them, with the grandparents’ suite placed at the quieter end and the child’s room buffered between the two adult rooms. Separateness is preserved, and walls are removed.

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The material palette is drawn from a 1970s Mediterranean-modernist register, chosen for its warmth and a tolerance of daily family use. Burr-veneer joinery wraps the television wall and recurs in the bedroom doors, where it meets cork-toned LOQA ceramic mosaic laid in a loose grid. Ivory plaster walls and pale travertine-toned floors hold a quiet ground; Calacatta Viola — all oxblood and plum veining — is reserved for the kitchen splashback and the principal vanities.

The bathrooms are the loudest decision. Each is finished in a single saturated colour — deep red mosaic in one, soft butter-yellow tile in another — a device that gives the small rooms a clear identity without resorting to ornament. Doorways are treated as objects in their own right: one faced in mustard-toned burl, another set into a field of forest green.

Throughout, Ascend Design has favoured fewer, larger gestures over decorative layering. A single woven rug under the dining table. One paper lantern over the living room. A study desk built into a recess rather than placed against a wall. The result reads as one home — but one that remembers it was once two.

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[Images courtesy of Ascend Design. Photography by Studio Stacked.]