Brewers Arts and Crafts design - Singapore
Brewer’s Arts and Crafts design
The Geddes House is one of the first houses that the British architect Frank Wilmin Brewer designed under his own name, after setting up his own practice in 1933. By then he was already known for the distinctive houses he’d designed as architect of Swan & MacLaren, the largest architectural firm in Singapore.
Amongst them were the Sandilands Buttery House on Cluny Road and the Barbour House on Dalvey Estate Road. With their brick buttresses and arches, textured plasterwork, oriole windows and pitched, overhanging roofs, these houses were good examples of the Arts and Crafts style.
The Geddes House was next in line. As its forerunners, it looks impressive and homely at the same time. Brewer situated the buildings on the highest part of the plot, with the garage and service quarters closest to the road and the main house further off. Such a configuration was relatively new to Singapore – where service quarters had usually been hidden behind the main house – but it was most practical and pleasing, as it left the greenest half of the plot completely to the main house.
The bent layout and the porch ensured maximum privacy to the eastern part of the house, where Brewer indeed planned the most important spaces: the loggia or veranda in front and the lounge or drawing room right behind it. The latter got French windows on three sides, providing views and lots of light and fresh air. Brewer accentuated these openings on the outside with brick arches, curving up from the high brick plinth of the main house. Compared to the ground floor, the upper floor – where Brewer planned three bedrooms, bathrooms and a dressing room – looks more enclosed and sober.
Interesting is the amount of detail Brewer put into the house; not only did he design the wooden doors and stairs, but he also had a hand in the bathroom interiors. The stylised shapes that can be seen here already revealed his interest in the Streamline Moderne style that would characterise his later designs for the Swimming Club and the Cathay Building. Especially the latter would – with its eleven storeys and unconventional design – become a landmark in Singapore and set Brewer’s reputation as a modern architect. His stylistically diverse, but proportionally harmonious legacy – of which the Geddes House is a well preserved part – definitely shows his great architectural capability