The Sensible House

The Sensible House Can a house help us live with more sensibility to our environment? In today’s world, it is easy to shut off from the real world by plugging into our mobile devices & huddle up in an air-conditioned room. We wanted to create an “open” house that encourages the inhabitants to interact with one another & also with the environment; in a way where we gradually discover and develop our own degrees of conscious to subconscious boundaries. The house has 3 generations & 3 cats all living together. Spaces are created to allow for interactions in both intended & serendipitous ways. Rooms that help us to find privacy yet assurance in the presence of one another. Interactions that help us to tune ourselves to the daily habits of living together. Can a house lead us to live better- by subtly nudging us to be more aware of the people and the activities going on? Imagine a house where morning greetings between the grandmother and her grand-daughter occur through a daily ritual of peering through the perforated staircase. The house has an ongoing relationship with the weather. In Singapore, we do not have four seasons, yet there is actually so much nuance in our climate that we take for granted. Can a house help us regain this sensibility to wind, rain and the sun? Imagine a house where the morning light breeze from the bathroom gives a completely different feeling from the perpetual draft that drifts through the corridors over the day. The sensible house is a house about being. It took a process of collaborative enquiry of what it means to be “sentient” through the eyes of the architect and the inhabitants who were going to live there. To re-discover our own intrinsic sensibilities with the world. Living together and living sensibly.