Green Fluidity

The newly-revealed Golf Clubhouse at Tanah Merah Country Club breathes modernity into its surroundings.

Praise POH

URBNarc, a boutique design practice headquartered in Singapore, has redesigned the two-storey clubhouse at Tanah Merah Country Club. It sits harmoniously with its immediate and surrounding landscape, exuding an air of timeless elegance.

An Additions and Alterations (A&A) project, it was formed with the key objective to integrate the new build with the existing buildings and golf course.

“The clubhouse is designed to engage within its setting with a harmonious choice of building materials, subdued colour selection and a design where transition spaces between built form and the exterior environment is seamless,” says Gaurang Khemka, founder of URBNarc.

As Khemka and his team did not have the luxury of designing the building from scratch, they had to work around the legacy architecture and infrastructure, which proved to be rather challenging as many unforeseen circumstances sprang up on them during construction.

As a result, they had to recalibrate the design and reorganize the construction sequence with the contractor on the fly.

“We found a telecom manhole during the excavation in a key public area, that was not on any as-built drawings. We had to seek permission from Singtel and the Ministry of Transport [to ask] if we could relocate or abandon it. It took six weeks to get approval to abandon it as we were laying new telephone lines anyway.

“This impacted the project construction sequence, but we were able to advise the contractor to work around the situation by focusing on other areas and creating a phasing diagram for them.”

In addition, while the changing rooms in a nearby existing building were completely re-designed internally, the client was inflexible about losing the pitched roofs over them.

As a result, the team was tasked with an interesting challenge to assimilate the existing pitched roofs over the changing rooms with the contemporary flat roof design of the rest of the clubhouse.