Brewin Design Office brings a touch of New York nostalgia to Singapore’s Nassim neighbourhood for a minimalist apartment interior design renovation.

Ask any architect and they’ll tell you that nostalgia can be a quiet but powerful palimpsest that informs every design decision – from the colour palette and furniture specified, even to the way light is directed to fall on a wall. And in this tranquil apartment interior design located in Singapore’s tony Nassim neighbourhood, memories of its owner’s years in New York are just below the surface. ‘She had just moved back to Singapore,’ recalls Robert Cheng, whose Singapore architecture firm Brewin Design Office was tapped for the renovation work.

‘She showed me images of apartments in uptown Manhattan and Tribeca-styled residential designs, many of which referenced the high quality joinery work that’s so common to North American interior design and fabrication.’

Robert Cheng’s interventions in the ten-year-old property were surgically precise as he inserted a set of triple sliding doors in the foyer, each bijou canopied volume opening up to the other like a pyramid lined with green onyx marble columns – the procession unfurling finally into a lofty living room awash with light streaming in through the balcony, and a floating quality created by the low-slung furniture.