Colin Seah — ‘Minister of Design’

/ The Edge Property |

December 10, 2015 9:40 AM SGT

Colin Seah, founder and director of design at Ministry of Design (MOD), remembers his first encounter four years ago with the original row of shophouses built in the 1900s behind Loke Thye Kee Restaurant in Penang. The owner, 1919 Global Sdn Bhd, wanted Seah to conserve and repurpose the row of shophouses as a boutique hotel.

The buildings had been gutted, and had been vacant for more than 20 years. “From the ground floor, you could look up and see the sky because the rafters and beams had all rotted,” says Seah, 43. “It looked like a war zone.”

In addition to restoring the buildings, in one of the earlier plans, Seah had originally wanted to add hotel rooms by straddling them over the courtyards. The Penang Heritage Trust, the conservation and heritage body, did not approve. “It wasn’t enough just to keep the façade; they wanted to keep the spirit of the old building,” says Seah. “So, if the original building had a central courtyard, we had to keep it as a central courtyard.”

The result is that Loke Thye Kee Residences (LTK Residences) contains just five residences. Each room occupies the entire floor plate on the second level of a shophouse and measures 34 to 38 sq m. The rooms have exposed brick walls, hardwood timber flooring with streamlined furniture, finishing and fittings, which lend a contemporary twist to the setting. “The idea was not to have an unfiltered preservation, but to draw certain vignettes of the old and transform it completely as an aesthetic,” he explains.

The courtyard garden on the second level of Loke Thye Kee Residences

For the lobby, Seah insisted on using only the original old tiles of the shophouses, and had to scavenge across all five shophouses to cobble them up. Because there were not enough tiles to reach the edges, he added a border trimming.

The project took three years to complete and the hotel opened in August.

Prior to LTK Residences, MOD had designed the Macalister Mansion, a colonial bungalow which was transformed into an eight bedroom boutique hotel in 2012. MOD is also repurposing the oldest cinema in Penang, The Majestic, as a boutique hotel.

Fortuitous entrepreneur It all started in 2005, when Seah took on his first project in Singapore: the New Majestic Hotel on Bukit Pasoh Road in Chinatown. It was unplanned. Seah had no intention of starting his own business, as he was involved in researching design pedagogy and serving as a design critic at the School of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for the past four years. He was contemplating returning to the US to obtain a doctorate to further his academic career in architecture.

Even the meeting with hotelier-restaurateur Loh Lik Peng, owner and operator of the New Majestic, was fortuitous. Two years earlier, in 2003, Loh had opened his first boutique hotel, the 32-room 1929 on Keong Saik Street, which sparked a boom in that sector. Loh transformed a former distressed property purchased at an auction for less than $4 million into a hip boutique hotel. His next purchase in 2005 was the Majestic Hotel, and it was also a distressed sale.

Loh was a dinner guest at Seah’s home one evening in early 2005. Seah had completely gutted the 80 sqm flat and transformed it into a contemporary home with raw concrete finish and an industrial-style kitchen. “We had modular furniture so you could move them around,” he says. “We had all these wires hanging from hooks in the ceiling so the lights could follow the furniture across the room.”

Little did Seah know that his home would become the showcase that would persuade Loh to engage him as the design architect for the New Majestic. Seah recounts how Loh walked around the apartment and said to him, “I wonder what you would do if you had something bigger.”

When first approached to take on the New Majestic Hotel project, Seah thought he could juggle designing the project with his full-time job at the National University of Singapore. It was impossible, however, so he decided to quit his job at NUS. That led to the setting-up of the Ministry of Design. He chanced upon the name when he was reading the Bible one day, where it talked about the different ministries, he says. In Singapore, there are also many different ministries, for example, the Ministry of Defence, he adds.

“I think I should change my card and call myself ‘minister of design’ and, as I get older, I can refer to myself as senior minister and then minister mentor eventually,” says Seah jokingly.

‘Re-visioning heritage’ The design of the New Majestic and the attention it garnered propelled Seah and MOD to fame and on to more projects, particularly the transformation of conservation shophouses into boutique hotels. The design of The Club hotel, a boutique 22-room hotel on Ann Siang Hill in 2010, as well as the series of properties in Penang such as Macalister Mansion and LTK Residences, have since followed.

“We might want to work on a renovation of the New Majestic soon,” says Seah. “It opened in 2006, so it’s coming to its 10th year.” A decade ago, when the New Majestic was created, a new attitude towards conservation was heralded. Most projects were just tapping on the colonial past but, here, there was no recalling of the past, he says. “It was a re-visioning of heritage, a direct editing of certain things from the past, which are then left in its raw, unfiltered form.” This is most visible in the ceiling of the reception.

Beyond Singapore and Malaysia, MOD has designed the five-star luxury resort W Retreat in Phuket and the Capri in Brisbane, and is in the midst of designing a luxury resort on the island of St Martin’s in the Caribbean.

Beyond lifestyle About 70% of MOD’s work is involved in “lifestyle projects” such as hotels and restaurants, but it is also involved in bigger commercial and mixed-use developments. In Penang, for instance, MOD is designing a mixed-use project on Church Street with a 100-room hotel sitting on top of a mall. In Kuala Lumpur, MOD was involved in the design of Sunway Velocity, a mixed-use development.

Other large-scale, mixed-use developments MOD has designed include Ascendas Guangzhou Knowledge City in China, where construction is currently underway. The project has 5.7 million sq ft of gross floor area and a mix of commercial, retail and residential buildings, with the clubhouse as the central feature.

Another project in China that MOD is working on is a 1.6 million sq ft mixed-use scheme for giant developer China Vanke in Qingdao. The development will have two residential towers and an office block sitting on top of a retail and F&B podium. So far, MOD has designed seven projects for China Vanke in China, including the dramatic Vanke Triple V Gallery along the coast of Dongjiang Bay in Tianjin.

In Houhai, Beijing, MOD is involved in the design of a new hotel called Vue, scheduled for opening in the middle of next year. Vue will be a new hotel brand under the Crystal Orange Hotel Group, which runs a chain of affordable hotels across China under its “Orange” brand. MOD is not just the design architect for the hotel, but also the brand designer and strategist, according to Seah.

From designing spaces to products Beyond spaces, Seah is interested in the design of brands and products. MOD has already designed products such as the Ming 647 chair, the SG50 tote bag, the Kallang Wave bench, a mirror called “A measure of reflection” and a reinterpretation of the Kvadrat pouf. “Furniture is an obvious candidate, but what other iterations?” says Seah.

Recently, two interesting things caught Seah’s attention. One was the world of virtual reality. “So far, virtual reality has been used as a visualisation tool to preempt what the actual space is going to look like,” he explains. “To me, it’s a very direct and binary usage of the technology, and so it’s now more as a design tool.”

What Seah is more interested in is using virtual reality to enhance all interactions for a more “immersive experience”. For instance, one could go online shopping, don virtual reality goggles, enter a virtual three-dimensional boutique, browse the items and even try them on, he reckons. “But it will be years before that takes off,” he concedes.

In the meantime, he is starting a new design studio within MOD to include the design of products under the name A Good Thing. The products will be made from a new biodegradable and non-toxic plastic called Lumin X. For a start, Seah sees potential in developing a line of baby and toddler products, ranging from feeding bottles and eating utensils to toys. “For such items, the toxic-free element is very important,” he says.

He believes there is room for well-designed quality products that can be produced for the masses. Seah sees MOD evolving as a design firm. “Our goal is still to create memorable experiences, but just in a different context,” he says. “It will still be totally coherent with A China Vanke master planned development in Dongjiang Bay, Tianjin MOD designed the Vanke Triple V Gallery, on the coast of Dongjiang Bay, Tianjin what we’re doing.”

Seah: Our goal is still to create memorable experiences, but just in a different context