More Hanging Lights

I am such a light floozie. I might be the only person I know capable of buying a hanging light before having a place or home. Certainly, that's like buying petrol before you have a car, earrings before you have pierced ears. A tennis bag before you can play. This is the light that I wanted to get for the bedrooms. It's the Frisbi light by Archille Castiglioni for Flos.


The light was designed in 1978 so it's a 30 year old design but it has a timeless simplicity about it. It's made of black polished nickel, 28.7 inches in height, 23.6 inches in width. It was on a deep discount in Singapore at about 1/3rd the retail price of $780 in the US and it was only slightly more expensive than the common rattan or square drop glass hanging lights in Balestier.


Then I saw this light by Kevin Patrick MacCarthy, a light designer in New York and thought, oh, hello! It's rather beautiful isn't it? Despite having economised myself and bought a black spotlight track for the spare bedroom (cheap, effective and good for paitings), I thought, well, perhaps I could have this in there!

New Apartment pictures

Exciting. We are painting this week, having sorted out the paint colours. And they are doing the electrical work and the mosiac tiling.




We still have no master bedroom doorway. And the recessed line in the living room ceiling is broad enough to be a ditch.




There is now parquet floor in the room and timber decking in the patios. And there are false ceilings in and the wardrobe is removed.

From Wikipedia on Newton and Novena

Newton is relatively sedate compared to the Orchard and Tanglin areas, which are nearby. The district is old and retains the slow, sleepy pace of decades ago. It is spacious and liberally sprinkled with greenery, resembling a residential estate more than a downtown core. Yet Newton is still an expensive place to live in, since it is sandwiched between the hip Orchard Road and the posh Bukit Timah. There are some hotels here and a lot of private property, with schools and shops to facilitate accommodation.

Newton is named after Howard Newton, a British engineer during the colonial period. During the early 1800s, the area was mainly a nutmeg plantation. What was not plantation ground, however, was a cemetery for the Jewish and Christians.

Newton Circus, which is the centre of Newton today, used to be a train station on Singapore 's first railway line. Today, the circus is a road that links Orchard to Little India, Bukit Timah and the Pan Island Expressway (PIE). Accidents occur frequently on this busy road because of the congestion and lack of visibility.

There is not much to see or do in Newton, except for Newton Food Centre. This is a large, newly-renovated place serving some of the best hawker food in Singapore. It is known for its sambal stingray and sup tulang, and is where many clubbers head to for supper after a tiring night of partying.

Other than Newton Food Centre, the estate comprises private property. Most of the property in Newton are terraces or semi-detached houses, but there are some apartments here too. Cairnhill Community Centre facilitates residents of Newton. Also, a large portion of Newton is taken up by Bukit Timah Waterworks, a water treatment plant.

Novena and its roads (Jalan Novena Barat and Novena Terrace), buildings (Novena Ville and Novena Gardens), as well as the MRT station in this area are named after the Novena Church, or Church of St Alphonsus at Thomson Road.

The current premises of the Novena Church were owned by a wealthy Chinese businessman,Wee Kah Kiat. The premises were bought over by the Redemptorist community in 1948 and a small church was built by May 1950. The Saturday novenas began in January 1949 and were heavily publicised in 1951. The novenas are a mission given by Pope Pius IX to the Redemptorist fathers to make Our Lady of Perpetual Succour well-known throughout the world.

Housing in Novena tends to be more expensive than other estates because of its prime location and facilities. Novena has no HDB flats, but is made up of condominiums and private housing. There are many condominiums in Novena such as Birmingham Mansions, Thomson Euro-Asia and Lion Towers. These condominiums generally surround the sole school in the area, Saint Joseph's Institution Junior , formerly known as St Michael's School

Tiles- Red, White or Stainless Steel?

These are the mosiac tiles that we're meant to choose from for the kitchen. Pretty much most my life, I've wanted a kitchen that has a hot mosiac red backsplash. Something about the the backdrop of glossy dark red tiles, set against white crockery or stainless steel appliances, just sends shivers down my little aesthetic spine.


But it was not to be. Firstly, it was terribly difficult to specify what I wanted. Nobody understood this concept of mosiac, dark and red together. I thought it would be totally second-nature, but everyone gave me blank stares. Apparently this "look" is not used much in Singapore and the tile stores here, including the mega-suppliers, specialise more in pure (large) ceramic tiles and mosiacs of glass (translucent) tiles, or the copper-bronzed kind.

Also, apparently red tiles are particularly hard to make and to therefore to find, becuase red glaze is more rare nowadays. Z was nice enough to track down Corderoy and Finch, this restaurant which had a red mosiac surface but which has now closed down. They provided us with a supplier called Hanafy in Balestier, which we managed to track down but they insisted they had no red tiles now and were't very helpful.

In the end, I wound up with three or four alternative options. This might be a blessing in disguise because the kitchen is not pure white. If it were pure white, then the red tiles would look awesome. But the kitchen is more accurately pure white, with existing wall tiles of a very nuetral taupe-grey colour.

The first option was pale aqua jadeite coloured tiles, which I would similarly have used if the kitchen had been pure white. The second - fourth options are the ones you see above, a pure white mosiac, which would offset the glossy white cupboards well, in terms of texture (but not colour, thus keeping the whole room colour very neutral).

The last two options are a stainless steel tile, where the thin layer of stainless steel is wrapped around the tile (this produces a really cool mosiac effect but unfortunately, my wall surfaces for mosiacs are right next to the already stainless-steel plate backsplash and stainless steel plating next to stainless steel mosiac just looked wrong) and a galvenized ridged tile, which produces perhaps too industrial a look considering the apartment-regularity of the kitchen.

In the end, the white. Keeping it simple, keeping it simple...

Do a Fan Wave...

I am definitely of the category of people who prefer discreet fans. In fact, I would prefer no fans at all but who am I kidding, we live in the sweltering tropics and air-conditioned rooms are very expensive.

Generally, my preference in fans is that they be as plain and streamline as possible, without being hokey. I also detest any that have strings or balled cables dangling from the lights, it reminds me vaguely of latrines. I also draw the line at ceiling fans with lights, for some reason, I really do think its just beyond tacky and quite an assault of one's aesthetics. Ok, I have seen a Few, very Few good examples of that, (and these are usually in theme restaurants) but generally, I hate hate that the lights come in these frosted blue-bell shapes! Yuck!

In the end, I discovered that there really aren't many fans that one can choose from in Singapore, KDK, Elmark and Fanco pretty much have a strangle hold on the market and from what I can tell, Fanco is a store in-house brand. In the midst of discovering this and exploring Balestier of course, I learnt more than I do now about both lights and fans.


We are probably going to wind up with the basic 3-blade white KDK model, which can be had for a very reasonable $85 (comes with a 3 speed wall regulator) or the more upmarket 4-blade model with remote control for $185 (also in white, though the picture shown is in metallic).


I did though, find that there's lots of research that can be done about the health advantages to having proper ventilation and encouraging air movement. It's really interesting and the distributor of KDK fans in Singapore has a very good website about just that.

1) How does ventilation works?

The general concept of ventilation is all about moving air from outside of the building to the inside. Using ventilation fan, the fan draws the air out of the building and air natural replaces itself through spaces. Usually ventilation is useful in places where air is unable to replace itself naturally or in areas where air are stagnant.


Except as you can see, they wrote "How does ventilation works?". Yes, that is generally the kind of impression I have of people who install fans, too.

The second page on "Types of Ventilation Fans" is much better, though arguably no prettier.

There are mainly few types of ventilation for your home: Window Mount or Ceiling Mount. As the name suggest, they are to be each mounted differently on window, wall as well as ceiling and they will only achieve optimal performance when mounted on the recommended place.


1) Window Mount Ventilation

Window mount ventilation is usually used for home as well as small spaces whereby the ventilation fan mounted on a piece of material such as glass, wood or plastic. A rounded hole is cut in the middle of the mounting material and the fan is mounted on it. The most common method of installing the fan would be cutting a hole in the middle of the window pane and mounting it up directly. However HDB regulations states that residents are not to do any changes or mount up anything to the window without submitting applications to the authorities. Therefore, the only method to mount up the fan onto the window would be submit a plan which includes the details of the ventilation fan to be mounted on the window to the board.


2) Ceiling Mount Ventilation

Ceiling mount ventilation fan is usually fixed up in area such as office, shopping malls and home, where users have the option of fixing up the fan to the false ceiling. However, for such ventilation system to work, a ducting system needs to be in place to fix up the ventilation fan as the ceiling ventilator comes with a duct plug where air will be exhausted. A duct will guide the air out of the building and such ventilation system is usually recommend to areas who needs ventilation to different sectors over a large area.



Then I found, to my amusement, that there is a Singaporean blog devoted to fans. This is the website. http://singapore-fan.blogspot.com/



I've found his work very helpful, for example, the matrix of how long your blades should be, depending on the size of your room and his photos of ridiculous fans, well....ridiculous.

Update July 2008

Am so incredibly sleepy. The place is coming along, though not without I guess the inevitable hiccup. The good: the timber decking and electrical work is in and apparently this week, so will the parquet flooring, mosiac tiling and false ceiling. Ho hum..I've heard that tune before!

On the especially good news, Z was incredibly happy that the SCV (cable) point can be moved to the study-side of the bedroom. He imagines watching TV while he works, I suppose. You should have seen his face light up when the contractor asked if we wanted additional power points and "the SCV point", worse then a little boy at Christmas, I haven't seen such a pleased-as-the-cat-who-got-the-cream look for a Long Time. I had to look out the window while the contractor said about how moving the cable point would require hacking it into the wall and then pulling it out at the opposite side of the room (eek). Z of course, readily agreed.

The bad: after shopping with our contractor for lights, I realized that the invoice came up to $50 per down light and $55 per halogen light. We are going to some other shops in Balestier today, after popping by another one proved that downlights average $13-18. Hopefully our delay on buying the lights doesn't affect the installation of the lights in the newly built false ceiling.

The nuetral: we saw the chinese chest again, it's very bright yellow, brighter than I remembered. It's also twice as expensive as the second (white-grey) chest that we saw at Mu Dan. I am now worried about our sofa colours and that they are too bi-coloured. Perhaps I should have gone with a more solid colour.

I just discovered this site that has Google Sketch pictures, how cool. The apartment has a pool table apparently. That's what you can get if you choose to live in Sengkang. A huge square footage but apparently, no less in renovation and furniture costs, this guy spent a mint on some awfully falala red patterned wallpaper and Miss K flos lamp!

Creating a colour chart

Should have done this ages ago but here are the living room inspirations and colours, the wood furniture and sofa fabrics and the lobby wallpaper.


These are the colours for the master bedroom, which will be pale blue with a textured omexco wallpaper and the spare bedroom, which will be a beige-stone colour with the dandelion wallpaper.