Chapter 6

Layers and the 2024 Restoration

A building that has been a home, a railway residence, a girls’ school, a Salvation Army headquarters and a campus cannot be returned to one moment without losing most of its story. The latest restoration chose not to try.

A timeline of occupants

1882–1885 Tan Yeok Nee builds his residence on Tank Road.
1902 The family leaves; Tank Road Railway Station opens and the station master moves into the house.
1912 onwards The house is held in trust for the Church of England, becomes known as Temple House, and serves as St Mary’s Home and School for Eurasian girls.
1938 The Salvation Army makes it its Malayan headquarters.
1942–1945 During the Japanese Occupation the house is seized, damaged by bombs, used for storage and looted.
6 July 1951 After repairs, the Salvation Army headquarters is officially reopened. The Army stays until 1991.
1974 The house is declared a national monument.
1999–2000 A major restoration adapts it for educational use.
2022 The Karim Family Foundation acquires the property.
From 2024 DP Architects restore the property, with Assoc Prof Yeo Kang Shua (SUTD) as conservation consultant.
1 November 2025 The house reopens to the public.

The 1999–2000 work

The restoration around the turn of the millennium was substantial. More than a hundred craftsmen worked on decorative features, gable artworks, wood carvings and gilded woodwork, and the house was adapted for a business school campus. Those interventions kept the building alive but also introduced changes — glass enclosures, new partitions, institutional fittings — that later conservators had to evaluate.

Three challenges

In interviews at the reopening, Prof Yeo described three main problems. The first was the layered history itself: understanding how earlier interventions had aged and how they sat against original fabric, and restoring authenticity without erasing the evidence of change. The second was the scarcity of traditional craft skills in Singapore. The third was reconciling heritage integrity with a new adaptive use.

The aim, in Prof Yeo’s words, was to make the house’s layers “legible, allowing the building to tell its own story across time.” — Assoc Prof Yeo Kang Shua, as reported by The Straits Times

Different treatment for different parts

Prof Yeo grouped the house into three broad approaches, each tied to a phase of history and a part of the building. The entrance hall and main hall, where much late nineteenth-century fabric remains, were treated with the lightest hand. Areas that mixed original features with institutional additions, such as the two-storey south wing, were repaired. The rear hall, heavily modified around 1999 and 2000, was more open to adaptation. Within this framework each section received preservation, repair or adaptation according to how much authentic material survived.

Some later additions were removed so that the original plan and the alignment of rooms and courtyards could be read again. The glass panels around the main courtyard were one example. Building services and environmental systems were upgraded discreetly, with attention to natural ventilation and low-impact repair materials.

Craftsmen from Chaozhou

Because Singapore no longer had craftsmen able to restore the Teochew timber carving and ceramic roof ornament to the necessary standard, the team went to the source. In October 2023 architects and consultants travelled to Chaozhou to arrange for thirty skilled craftsmen, including twenty masters of Teochew architecture, to come to Singapore. Their materials, tools and methods were chosen to stay consistent with the original building tradition. This is a reminder that conserving architecture is also about keeping crafts alive.

The house today

The reopened house is a mix of public and working spaces. It has a gallery on architecture, craftsmanship and conservation, a restaurant called Loca Niru serving contemporary Japanese-French food, and an Artist-in-Residence programme featuring Tan Ngiap Heng, the great-great-grandson of Tan Yeok Nee. Offices occupy the spaces around the central residence. Some rooms, including Karim Hall and the front and rear courtyards, are also used for private and company occasions; an events overview is available on getout.sg.

For this reading room the important outcome is that the house is open. A building that spent most of its life behind institutional doors can now be walked through, and its craft read up close.