Bar Kap
Reflective surfaces are integrated into the main bar and central furniture, bringing fragments of the ceiling down into the field of view.
As guests approach, sit and move around the bar, the architecture appears again in reflection—sometimes whole, sometimes abstracted.
A House that Continues to Live
How should a national monument be preserved?
By keeping it untouched?
Or by allowing life to enter again?
Bar Kap occupies the main hall and adjoining rooms of the House of Tan Yeok Nee, one of Singapore’s most significant surviving Teochew mansions. Built between 1882 and 1885, the house has lived many lives: a merchant’s residence, railway quarters, a school and home, and later, a traditional Chinese medicine institution. Each use left behind a different memory of occupation, encounter and exchange.
The design does not attempt to return the building to one fixed moment in its history.
Instead, it begins with the idea that heritage has always evolved through use.
Bar Kap introduces a new programme of hospitality into the monument—one that allows the house to be entered, experienced and inhabited once more. Original architecture remains the protagonist. New interventions are measured and reversible in spirit, designed not to overwrite the building, but to reveal it, respond to it and add another layer to its continuing story.
This is not a bar placed inside an old house.
It is a bar shaped by everything the house has been.
Heritage, Made Hospitable
The project transforms the act of preservation into an act of welcome.
Guests do not observe the house from a distance. They sit beneath its intricate timber ceiling. They move through its chambers. They gather where earlier generations lived, worked, travelled, learned and healed. History becomes something atmospheric and bodily: held in the proportions of the rooms, the patina of materials, the height of a platform, the weight of a curtain and the reflection of a ceiling overhead.
The design creates intimacy without diminishing the monumentality of the original hall.
A sequence of seating conditions allows different forms of hospitality to unfold within the same volume. Raised banquettes along the edges create more private territories, while lower tables occupy the centre. The varied levels subtly change how the room is perceived, allowing guests to experience the hall from different heights and proximities while retaining sightlines across the architecture.
Translucent curtains introduce softness and enclosure without forming hard boundaries. They divide the hall atmospherically rather than architecturally—allowing movement, shadow and glimpses of other guests to animate the space.
Hospitality here is not only service.
It is the careful choreography of how people enter, gather, discover and remain.
Drawing the Eye Upward
One of the house’s most remarkable features lies above: its richly constructed timber ceiling.
Yet ceilings are often experienced only peripherally. Bar Kap makes the act of looking upward part of the guest experience.
Reflective surfaces are integrated into the main bar and central furniture, bringing fragments of the ceiling down into the field of view. As guests approach, sit and move around the bar, the architecture appears again in reflection—sometimes whole, sometimes abstracted.
The mirror does not compete with the historic fabric. It returns attention to it.
The past is not represented through applied decoration. It is revealed through perception.
The Main Hall: A New Centre of Exchange
At the heart of the main hall is a long, branching communal bar and table.
Its form supports the social life of the room, allowing service, drinking and conversation to occur around a shared centre rather than across a conventional boundary. Guests can face one another, watch drinks being prepared or become part of a larger gathering.
The design references another chapter in the house’s history, when part of the building was occupied by a traditional Chinese medicine institution. Cabinetry draws from the ordered drawers and storage systems of an apothecary, reinterpreted through contemporary proportions, reflective planes and metal inlays.
What was once used to contain herbs and remedies now holds spirits, vessels and ingredients.
The reference is not nostalgic imitation. It is a continuity of function: measuring, storing, preparing and serving. A former place of medicine becomes a new place of restoration, gathering and exchange.
How should a national monument be preserved?
By keeping it untouched?
Or by allowing life to enter again?
Bar Kap occupies the main hall and adjoining rooms of the House of Tan Yeok Nee, one of Singapore’s most significant surviving Teochew mansions. Built between 1882 and 1885, the house has lived many lives: a merchant’s residence, railway quarters, a school and home, and later, a traditional Chinese medicine institution. Each use left behind a different memory of occupation, encounter and exchange.
The design does not attempt to return the building to one fixed moment in its history.
Instead, it begins with the idea that heritage has always evolved through use.
Bar Kap introduces a new programme of hospitality into the monument—one that allows the house to be entered, experienced and inhabited once more. Original architecture remains the protagonist. New interventions are measured and reversible in spirit, designed not to overwrite the building, but to reveal it, respond to it and add another layer to its continuing story.
This is not a bar placed inside an old house.
It is a bar shaped by everything the house has been.
Heritage, Made Hospitable
The project transforms the act of preservation into an act of welcome.
Guests do not observe the house from a distance. They sit beneath its intricate timber ceiling. They move through its chambers. They gather where earlier generations lived, worked, travelled, learned and healed. History becomes something atmospheric and bodily: held in the proportions of the rooms, the patina of materials, the height of a platform, the weight of a curtain and the reflection of a ceiling overhead.
The design creates intimacy without diminishing the monumentality of the original hall.
A sequence of seating conditions allows different forms of hospitality to unfold within the same volume. Raised banquettes along the edges create more private territories, while lower tables occupy the centre. The varied levels subtly change how the room is perceived, allowing guests to experience the hall from different heights and proximities while retaining sightlines across the architecture.
Translucent curtains introduce softness and enclosure without forming hard boundaries. They divide the hall atmospherically rather than architecturally—allowing movement, shadow and glimpses of other guests to animate the space.
Hospitality here is not only service.
It is the careful choreography of how people enter, gather, discover and remain.
Drawing the Eye Upward
One of the house’s most remarkable features lies above: its richly constructed timber ceiling.
Yet ceilings are often experienced only peripherally. Bar Kap makes the act of looking upward part of the guest experience.
Reflective surfaces are integrated into the main bar and central furniture, bringing fragments of the ceiling down into the field of view. As guests approach, sit and move around the bar, the architecture appears again in reflection—sometimes whole, sometimes abstracted.
The mirror does not compete with the historic fabric. It returns attention to it.
The past is not represented through applied decoration. It is revealed through perception.
The Main Hall: A New Centre of Exchange
At the heart of the main hall is a long, branching communal bar and table.
Its form supports the social life of the room, allowing service, drinking and conversation to occur around a shared centre rather than across a conventional boundary. Guests can face one another, watch drinks being prepared or become part of a larger gathering.
The design references another chapter in the house’s history, when part of the building was occupied by a traditional Chinese medicine institution. Cabinetry draws from the ordered drawers and storage systems of an apothecary, reinterpreted through contemporary proportions, reflective planes and metal inlays.
What was once used to contain herbs and remedies now holds spirits, vessels and ingredients.
The reference is not nostalgic imitation. It is a continuity of function: measuring, storing, preparing and serving. A former place of medicine becomes a new place of restoration, gathering and exchange.
The Carriage Room: A Journey Held Within a Room
The Carriage Room draws from the period when the house became the residence of William Tearle, Singapore’s first railway manager.
Rather than reproduce the appearance of a historical railway carriage, the design evokes its emotional and spatial qualities: enclosure, movement, passage and connection.
The long proportions of the room are articulated through layered fabric, timber and patinated brass. Curtains with tasselled edges frame each seating bay, creating the intimacy of a private compartment. Textured surfaces and a continuous landscape artwork suggest scenery passing beyond a window, giving the static room a subtle sense of motion.
The result feels transported, but remains rooted in the history of the house.
It is both a room and a journey: an intimate space for gathering, shaped by a former resident whose life was defined by movement between places.
The Ming Yi Chamber: Hospitality as Theatre
The Ming Yi Chamber offers a more private and concentrated form of hospitality.
A curtain conceals the room’s display before opening to reveal it, turning arrival into a quiet theatrical moment. At the centre, a shared table brings guests close to the preparation of drinks. The distance between host and guest is reduced. Mixing, pouring and serving become part of the experience rather than activity hidden behind a counter.
Clay vessels line the room, supporting Bar Kap’s programme of ageing cocktails in traditional earthenware.
The vessels are both functional and symbolic.
Clay fermentation and maturation draw upon one of the oldest forms of storing and transforming food and drink. Within the context of the monument, the process takes on further meaning: time does not simply age the building; it also develops what is served within it. The house, the vessel and the drink are all shaped by duration.
Hospitality becomes an encounter with time.
Jing Studio: A Different Pace of Welcome
During the day, Jing Studio operates as a tea atelier.
Its atmosphere is quieter and more deliberate. Display shelves reinterpret traditional forms through a contemporary lens, while a tea counter modelled after colonial cabinetry forms the centre of the room. Here, the tea master prepares each brew in view of the guests, transforming service into a shared ritual.
The room is shaped by the pace of tea: waiting, pouring, observing and tasting.
Traditional brewing methods coexist with cold brews and contemporary preparations. As elsewhere in Bar Kap, the project does not choose between preservation and reinvention. It allows one to continue through the other.
As daylight recedes and evening service begins, the character of the house changes gradually. Tea gives way to cocktails. Contemplation gives way to conversation. The architecture remains constant while the rituals around it evolve. Bar Kap and Jing Studio currently operate across these complementary daytime and evening experiences.
The Sustainability of Continuation
The most sustainable building is often one that is allowed to continue.
Bar Kap demonstrates how an existing monument can support contemporary life without surrendering its character. Instead of replacing the old with the new, the project works through retention, adaptation and carefully judged intervention.
The environmental value lies not only in preserving embodied material and architectural fabric. It lies in preserving relevance.
A building survives when it remains meaningful, useful and connected to everyday life.
Through hospitality, the House of Tan Yeok Nee becomes accessible to new audiences and new forms of encounter. The monument is not treated as a backdrop, nor reduced to an aesthetic theme. Its history actively determines the organisation, materials, rituals and programme of the new interior.
Bar Kap therefore proposes a form of adaptive reuse that is both physical and cultural.
It conserves a building by continuing its capacity to receive people.
The House Lives On
The House of Tan Yeok Nee has never had only one life.
It has been a home.
A place of work.
A railway residence.
A school.
A place of medicine.
Now, it is also a place to gather.
To drink.
To taste.
To spend time.
Bar Kap does not preserve the house by holding it still.
It preserves it by allowing life to enter again.
The story of the house is not finished.
It is still being lived.
The Carriage Room draws from the period when the house became the residence of William Tearle, Singapore’s first railway manager.
Rather than reproduce the appearance of a historical railway carriage, the design evokes its emotional and spatial qualities: enclosure, movement, passage and connection.
The long proportions of the room are articulated through layered fabric, timber and patinated brass. Curtains with tasselled edges frame each seating bay, creating the intimacy of a private compartment. Textured surfaces and a continuous landscape artwork suggest scenery passing beyond a window, giving the static room a subtle sense of motion.
The result feels transported, but remains rooted in the history of the house.
It is both a room and a journey: an intimate space for gathering, shaped by a former resident whose life was defined by movement between places.
The Ming Yi Chamber: Hospitality as Theatre
The Ming Yi Chamber offers a more private and concentrated form of hospitality.
A curtain conceals the room’s display before opening to reveal it, turning arrival into a quiet theatrical moment. At the centre, a shared table brings guests close to the preparation of drinks. The distance between host and guest is reduced. Mixing, pouring and serving become part of the experience rather than activity hidden behind a counter.
Clay vessels line the room, supporting Bar Kap’s programme of ageing cocktails in traditional earthenware.
The vessels are both functional and symbolic.
Clay fermentation and maturation draw upon one of the oldest forms of storing and transforming food and drink. Within the context of the monument, the process takes on further meaning: time does not simply age the building; it also develops what is served within it. The house, the vessel and the drink are all shaped by duration.
Hospitality becomes an encounter with time.
Jing Studio: A Different Pace of Welcome
During the day, Jing Studio operates as a tea atelier.
Its atmosphere is quieter and more deliberate. Display shelves reinterpret traditional forms through a contemporary lens, while a tea counter modelled after colonial cabinetry forms the centre of the room. Here, the tea master prepares each brew in view of the guests, transforming service into a shared ritual.
The room is shaped by the pace of tea: waiting, pouring, observing and tasting.
Traditional brewing methods coexist with cold brews and contemporary preparations. As elsewhere in Bar Kap, the project does not choose between preservation and reinvention. It allows one to continue through the other.
As daylight recedes and evening service begins, the character of the house changes gradually. Tea gives way to cocktails. Contemplation gives way to conversation. The architecture remains constant while the rituals around it evolve. Bar Kap and Jing Studio currently operate across these complementary daytime and evening experiences.
The Sustainability of Continuation
The most sustainable building is often one that is allowed to continue.
Bar Kap demonstrates how an existing monument can support contemporary life without surrendering its character. Instead of replacing the old with the new, the project works through retention, adaptation and carefully judged intervention.
The environmental value lies not only in preserving embodied material and architectural fabric. It lies in preserving relevance.
A building survives when it remains meaningful, useful and connected to everyday life.
Through hospitality, the House of Tan Yeok Nee becomes accessible to new audiences and new forms of encounter. The monument is not treated as a backdrop, nor reduced to an aesthetic theme. Its history actively determines the organisation, materials, rituals and programme of the new interior.
Bar Kap therefore proposes a form of adaptive reuse that is both physical and cultural.
It conserves a building by continuing its capacity to receive people.
The House Lives On
The House of Tan Yeok Nee has never had only one life.
It has been a home.
A place of work.
A railway residence.
A school.
A place of medicine.
Now, it is also a place to gather.
To drink.
To taste.
To spend time.
Bar Kap does not preserve the house by holding it still.
It preserves it by allowing life to enter again.
The story of the house is not finished.
It is still being lived.
LOCATION
Singapore
YEAR
Completion 2026
DISCIPLINE
INTERIOR
TYPOLOGY
RESTAURANT/BAR
SIZE (SQM)
170 SQM
TEAM
Selwyn Low, Ho Shuwei, Pamela Lee, Claudwie Tan, Jasmine Goh, Amyra Mawan, Celeste Chan
COLLABORATORS
Builder: BARN by FARM |
Branding: Feral |
Photographer: Jovian Lim
This project is realised by FARM’s built team BARN.
