Design Journal · Adopted
Giving Forgotten Places a Second Life
Some of the most charged spaces in a city are the ones standing empty.
Every year, our studio adopts a building nobody asked us to touch. No client, no brief, no budget — only a landmark that has gone quiet, and a single question: what could this become if heritage were treated as a beginning rather than a relic? We call them adopted projects, and they are how we stay ahead of the brief instead of waiting for it.
It is also how the studio grows. As part of an annual design initiative, every designer on the team is invited to contribute freely, challenge convention and test bold ideas without the constraints of a commercial programme. The adopted project becomes a platform for experimentation and professional growth — a way to keep our thinking fresh, our craft sharp, and our perspective ahead of where the industry is heading.
Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, 1932 — the heritage shell we adopted.
From terminus to Young Office Hub
Our most recent adoption is Tanjong Pagar Railway Station — a 1932 landmark of soaring halls, travertine and allegorical reliefs, its platforms long silent. We reimagined it as a Young Office Hub: collaborative workspaces beneath the original vaulted ceilings, lifestyle amenities threaded through the concourse, community spaces where ticket halls once stood, and a café set inside a restored railway carriage on the old tracks. The objective was to show how a heritage landmark can support entrepreneurship, collaboration, dining and cultural life — without erasing the very thing that makes it worth keeping.
“Track Bites” — a café built into a restored railway carriage on the original platform.
The carriage café at concourse level, framed by the station’s vaulted glass roof.
Heritage is not something
to preserve under glass. It
is something to keep using.
The design approach
The discipline is adaptive reuse: conserve what carries memory — the façade, the reliefs, the structural rhythm — and insert the new lightly and reversibly, always in dialogue with the old. Six principles guided the study:
Heritage conservation & preservation — protect the façade, halls and details that hold the building’s memory.
Adaptive reuse strategy — new interventions kept light, reversible and respectful of the original fabric.
Workplace & co-working design — flexible floors for focus, collaboration and young enterprise.
Lifestyle & F&B integration — dining and social spaces that keep the building alive after work.
Community-centric spaces — rooms for gathering, events and cultural exchange.
Sustainable design principles — daylight, greenery and material reuse over demolition.
Collaborative workspaces beneath the original halls — the Young Office Hub floor.
Glazed meeting rooms inserted lightly and reversibly within the heritage fabric.
Lifestyle, F&B and a boutique retail story
Warm timber and biophilic planting soften the civic scale; layered light returns drama to halls built for arrival and departure. A conservatory-style dining hall threads greenery through the old platforms, while a boutique-retail concept brings a bold, contemporary edge against the heritage backdrop — proof that the new and the old can share one roof and make each other sharper.
The conservatory-style dining hall — greenery threaded through the old platforms.
Lounge workspaces under the original roof structure, planting kept close.
The boutique-retail story — a bold, contemporary insert against the heritage shell.
The West Wing — a boutique design story
A second design language pushes the concept further. Where the conservatory celebrates light and greenery, the west wing answers with warmth and theatre: a checkerboard-marble arrival hall, bronze detailing and layered lighting give the old station the poise of a boutique hotel — heritage volume met with hospitality polish.
The boutique interior — warm timber, brass pendants and layered lighting lend the station the composure of a luxury retail hall.
A pendant-lit retail promenade threading display and craft through the concourse.
A boutique storefront beneath the heritage shell — dark timber, brass and arched glass against the original structure.
