$100K 2-Room Flexi BTO Renovation is All About the Finer Details

Inspired by the rooms in Marina Bay Sands, no less!

On paper, the brief for this 2-room Flexi BTO in Toa Payoh was simple. What wasn’t quite so typical was the $100,000 budget he gave interior designer Peter from SuperSketch Designers, along with plenty of creative freedom.

Taking cues from the newly refurbished rooms at Marina Bay Sands, Peter set out to create something far removed from the usual BTO flat. The result: a modern, hotel-inspired home that oozes luxury without being overwhelming.

With its clean, deceptively simple look, it’s easy to miss the finer details. Look a little closer, however, and that’s where the renovation reveals itself.

Carefully aligned proportions, continuous finishes, and countless almost-imperceptible details were planned down to the millimetre – proving that sometimes, it’s the things you barely notice that make a home feel this polished.

About the homeowner and the home

Belonging to a retiree who lives alone, this 2-room Flexi BTO was designed largely around his daily needs and lifestyle. “His requirements were very straightforward,” Peter says. “He also rarely hosts beyond the occasional friend or two, so the design is solely tailored around the way he lives.”

“He also left the design entirely up to me. All he said was to avoid dark colours and Victorian-style elements; essentially, he gave me his budget of $100K and told me to fully utilise it the way I want to.”

“That gave me the ability to do more things than I typically can do with the usual 2-room BTO renovation.”

About the entryway

“For this particular 2-room Flexi layout, I feel that the area right by the entrance is a bit wasted,” Peter says. “So I thought, why not turn it into a nice, inviting entryway?”

To set it apart from the rest of the home, he used darker marble-look flooring that contrasts beautifully against the unit’s lighter palette and introduced a skylight inspired by hotel foyers.

Additionally, the area around the bomb shelter was also carefully designed. Firstly, a floating black sintered stone ledge provides a spot for keys, wallets, and decor, while a shoe cabinet was also squeezed into the limited space beside the open kitchen.

But that’s not all. Even the proportions were deliberately planned down; Peter matched the placement and dimensions of the foyer flooring as closely as possible to the skylight above, down to the millimetre.

“It’s a small detail, and not something a homeowner usually notices,” Peter says, “but it’s these little things that add to the overall feel of the space.”

About the living room

Rather than using paint, Peter leaned heavily on full-height carpentry to create a cleaner, more seamless look. In fact, you’ll realise that all the walls in this home is wrapped in the same light fabric laminate, which allows the cabinets, walls, and concealed doors to appear as one continuous surface.

Peter also softened the carpentry with rounded corners, and then echoed those curves in the cove lighting above. “This is to create a subtle sense of continuity throughout the house, top and bottom,” he says.

Underfoot, oversized 1,500mm by 750mm floor tiles were chosen to give the compact living area a grander feel, with fewer grout lines breaking up the floor. Black accents were then introduced sparingly to add contrast and keep the otherwise neutral palette from looking too flat.

About the kitchen

Given the homeowner’s lifestyle and tight space, Peter kept the kitchen relatively straightforward, with an open L-shaped layout that made the most use of the space.

One of the more striking details, though, is the use of bookmatched Italian sintered stone across the countertop, backsplash, and adjoining pillar. The veining was carefully aligned to flow continuously across the different surfaces, reinforcing the sleek, hotel-inspired look.

With no need for a conventional dining table, the island behind the sofa doubles as the homeowner’s main dining spot. And lastly, a frosted glass door conceals the service yard, keeping the laundry area (and the mess that usually comes with it) out of sight from the communal space.

About the bedroom suite

The biggest change here was to the original flexible nook, which Peter merged with the main bedroom to create one larger, luxurious space. “Because he lives alone, I didn’t think there was a need to keep it as a separate room,” he explains.

That said, the homeowner still wanted his work area to feel separate from where he sleeps. So, Peter positioned the wardrobe between both these zones, creating a visual (and functional) divide between the bed and study desk.

This layout was planned with the future in mind. Should the homeowner ever need a live-in helper, a door can be added between the zones, while the study area can be converted into a separate sleeping space. “This way, he has the option to do this in the future while allowing him to maintain his lifestyle now,” Peter says.

In the bedroom proper, the same seamless design language continues with full-height cabinetry opposite the bed, while a green limewash finish behind it introduces another element of texture against the home’s otherwise polished look.

About the toilet

If you can believe it, the bathroom received even more extensive detailing than the rest of the home. Large-format Italian marble-look tiles were overlaid on the existing HDB tiles, while a new wall was erected between the basin and shower to create better separation between the wet and dry area.

Even the ceiling wasn’t spared from changes. Dropping the false ceiling by about 400mm to conceal the storage heater, Peter then incorporated cove lighting to keep the ceiling clean and seamless. “If I had just done the usual box-up – like the kind you see in other toilets – this space wouldn’t have the same feeling,” he says.

The finer touches continue with illuminated shower niches, a sintered stone integrated basin, Hansgrohe fittings and slim black trims around the floor. Individually, they may seem minor, but together they’re exactly the sort of details Peter says make the bathroom feel far more refined than a typical BTO toilet.

To sum up

For Peter, what makes this project memorable isn’t simply the unusually generous budget for a 2-room Flexi BTO – it’s also what it allowed him to do with the space. “Not many times are you able to wrap almost the whole house in carpentry and keep the same vibe throughout,” he says.

That consistency, however, came with its own challenges. “The small details were the biggest challenge for this house,” Peter shares, referring to everything from keeping the 900mm horizontal line perfectly aligned to matching the foyer flooring with the ceiling feature above. “Every measurement and dimension had to be very precise.”

And that, perhaps, is what the $100K renovation ultimately went towards: not one showstopping feature, but dozens of carefully considered decisions working quietly together. As Peter puts it: “It’s really all about the small details in the house.”