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Lush Singapore Lawns Green the Meera House From Guz Architects

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We have covered the work of Singapore-based Guz Architects here before. (Fish House Imagines Waves and Billowing Gusts of Cool Sea Breezes)Their Fish House is an solar-and-green-roof beauty that overlooks and echoes the swells of ocean waves.

Like the Fish House, Meera House is focused on a forward ocean view, and maximizes privacy despite typical cheek-by-jowl proximity to neighboring city lots.

In this house on the island of Sentosa in Singapore, Guz returns to several elements like the rolling green roof that made the Fish House so great.

In addition, each of the stories in the Meera House has been designed so that it appears to be a single story at ground level looking out on a grass lawn, as if it is situated at ground level. This makes for very grounding and human-scaled design focused around each garden.

Rimming each lawn is very proper British squared-off planting areas that echo Singapore’s colonial roots, and mitigating the view of the burgeoning growth of the city, seen across the bay.

Singapore has the perfect climate for the proper British lawns of the Guz signature lush green roofs – they are really green.

Even the actual ground-level lawn, a manicured tropical British/Singapore lawn provides the perfect backdrop to his very international sophisticated tropical style of green architecture.

To create all these levels, of course means a lot of stairs in the narrow lot. Guz makes the stairwell a focal point.

“Our strategy was to build a solid wall to each side neighbor to provide privacy where possible,  while creating a central light and stair well which would funnel the sea breeze through the centre of the building”.

A private walled water garden blocks the view of the neighbors to the side.

Looking the other way provides an equally tranquil view.

Under the Meera House is a cleverly engineered cooling feature that Guz pioneered in the Fish House, and proved to be a workable solution to reduce energy use.

This underwater room centered beneath the house is cooled by the swimming pool and provides a very unique thermal sink to naturally moderate the temperature in the house, reducing the need for energy-wasting air conditioning. As far as I know, only Guz Architects makes use of this double use of a swimming pool to reduce energy use.

Such an elegant way to build green!

::Guz Architects