At the top of a hill, the city meets the forest.
The site lies at the edge of Singapore’s Central Nature Catchment Reserve, one of the island’s most extensive natural landscapes. It seemed to offer an extraordinary opportunity: a family home immersed in nature, yet still within the city.
The promise was clear.
The difficulty was less apparent.
At the levels where family life would ordinarily unfold, neighbouring houses surrounded the site and obscured much of the forest beyond. Opening the house indiscriminately towards its surroundings would expose the family to neighbouring views. Turning inward for privacy would risk losing the very landscape that made the site exceptional.
The forest was close, but not always present.
The question was therefore not simply how to look towards it.
It was how to live with it throughout the house.
Rather than depending solely on distant views of the reserve, we began by drawing the qualities of the forest inward and allowing them to rise through the building.
Two tall atriums were introduced at the heart of the house, flanking its principal living spaces. Each begins with a water garden, from which trees and planting rise towards the open sky. Daylight descends through foliage. Water cascades into the gardens below. Rooms on different floors look into them from different heights.
Together, the atriums create two protected landscapes within the house—open to light, air and rain, yet sheltered from surrounding views.
Family life gathers around them.
The living, dining and entertainment spaces occupy the lower levels, allowing everyday activities to unfold beside water and planting. The landscape is not confined to a single courtyard or framed as a distant view. It reappears across the house—in the movement between rooms, in glimpses between floors, and in views through one garden towards another.
Between the two atriums sits the entertainment room.
Sunken slightly below the adjoining spaces, it becomes a clearing between two gardens. Water falls on either side. Trees rise beyond the glass. What might ordinarily have been an enclosed room becomes the place where water, planting and light are felt most intensely.
From here, the house begins to rise through the landscape it has created.
The lower floors are given to shared life, while bedrooms and private retreats occupy the levels above. This transition from communal to private space follows a corresponding change in the experience of nature: from water gardens at the base, through the foliage within the atriums, towards the canopies of the surrounding trees.
The house unfolds like a vertical landscape.
As it ascends, neighbouring buildings gradually recede and the reserve becomes more present. Yet greater height also brings greater exposure.
A delicate screen wraps the upper floors in response. It shields the bedrooms from direct sun and neighbouring views while allowing those within to look through towards the greenery beyond. Privacy is achieved not by closing the rooms away, but by placing a filtered layer between family life and its surroundings.
Planting continues across the upper terraces and roof, connecting the gardens within the house with the larger landscape beyond. These elevated gardens draw birds, bees and squirrels from the surrounding environment, allowing the ecology of the reserve to extend into the home.
The journey through the house becomes a journey through different layers of landscape.
It begins beside water.
It rises through leaves and branches.
And it ends among the canopy and sky.
Only at the upper levels is the original promise of the site fully revealed. The neighbouring houses fall away. The horizon opens. The forest, once present only at the edge, now seems to surround the house.
This is what it means to live above the trees.
Not to stand apart from nature or look down upon it, but to find a place within its layers.
