All-white coliving space Canvas House has opened in Singapore, taking over a former merchant’s house in the city’s Tanjong Pagar district with its blank rooms.

Local practice Ministry of Design overhauled the four-storey building’s interiors, drenching them in the white stuff: walls, floors and ceilings are all a brilliant shade, and furniture – an array of older pieces – has also been painted.

‘When it comes to adaptive reuse projects, the question is always the same, how do we tread the line between the past and the present?’ says the studio’s founder Colin Seah.

By treating the interiors in this way, the practice hopes that they are a ‘blank canvas’ for future interventions while offering a glimpse of the building’s past and its previous inhabitants.

In bedrooms, ‘choreographed glimpses of the past’ are offered via patches of raw floorboards, while elsewhere circular holes in the walls to peek onto the building’s brick frame.

The Singapore coliving space comprises four private suites and 1,600 sq ft of communal space, including a rooftop terrace. Rooms start from S$2700 per month via Figment.

Says Seah: ’[Canvas House] is a neutral white canvas for the future to be dreamt upon, rather than a wholesale homage to the past.’

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