The Criterion

We are a couple in our late 40s who spent many hours watching HGTV programs such Boise Boys, the Property Brothers, Flip Flop and Fixer Upper. So when looking for a contractor to renovate our original five-room HDB flat in Jurong east into a cosy retro-vintage themed house, we scoured Qanvast and found out about Fuse Concept. One of Fuse concept's project 'Eunos Crescent' caught our eye, and we knew that their design philosophy and how we wanted our home to be, would not be far apart. One of their interior designer Aaron Chong, who previously worked on a Sophia Hills apartment had design ideas that we identified with. Top on our wish list - an open-designed look (which means taking out a part of the kitchen wall and storeroom). having a barn door for our common toilet , black and white patterned kitchen tile, a large waterfall kitchen-island unit with inlaid tiles that separates kitchen and living spaces, a victorian-style toilet with herringbone tile on the walls with black toilet fixtures, shiplap walls and a large herringbone feature wall for our living room. With a big family, we decided to have a 8 feet dining table from Arthur Zaaro. We got a piece of beautiful slab wood from a Rain tree that had to make way for the expansion of the BKE in Bukit Timah. And also decided that we would have bamboo blinds for our balcony to cap off the retro-vintage look that we so desired. For my wife, the top item in her list is a SMEGG Refrigerator, to give her kitchen a true 70s look and feel. We got the biggest one - FAB50 that was on a special order from Italy. If I can describe our relationship with Aaron, it would be on based on openness and a commitment of him wanting us to get exactly what we wanted. At the conceptual level, Aaron understood what a retro-vintage themed home look like. However we differ at first in how 'loud' we want our retro to be. His first iteration of a 3D model of our house was in my opinion very conservative - light browns, light greens, teal, dominated his color palette. My wife and me were in the opinion that this is the house that has to exemplify the 70s (our year of birth) and we decided it has to be louder, so we pushed Aaron into looking at yellows, bright blues, dark blues, greys of all sorts, veridians, and splashes of red. One thing we learnt from HGTV, that to use such a loud palette we need to have plenty of greys on the walls and floors, and this will make the reds, blues, yellows and reds pop-out a bit. So it was both - muted walls, floors, furniture with loud laminates, black fixtures, kitchen equipment and splashes of colour here and there to frame the hippy vintage look. Aaron's strength lies in his ability to listen and to propose to us the possibilities as far as materials, construction and furniture is concerned. He often gives us choices with a tiered price range. We never felt that we were being pushed to accept any of his ideas of suggestions. Also his other super-human strength is his attentiveness to details. He has a 3D printed schematic of all the lighting points, fans and wall sockets to our house. He has another 3D printed schematic of the wardrobe with actual dimensions that take into account all the funny beams and the wall indentation of a HDB house. The earlier contractor that we got simply quote us the price like living room window 4feet - $XXXX but for Aaron, he will quote the window price exact to the nearest mm, so this gives us the assurance that as we renovate the house, the cost will not go up due to increase in size due to miscalculation of say window, door or wardrobe sizes. Everything has been planned to the nearest mm before the hacking begins. I have a chance to see the 3D rendering as well as the 2D top view of the house and each and every space that we are renovating. Also, Aaron is innovative in his thinking, he managed to squeeze out 'space' in our bedrooms by relocating the doors to the bedrooms. This provides an extra of 600m of wardrobe space behind the bedroom doors. He is also a genius in hiding aircon trunking, gas pipes and other type of pipings. He also learnt from us about shiplap walls and the reason why we insisted on having them - to have a bit of coastal and mid-century feel in the house. So we worked with his carpenter on how to have both herringbone and straight inlaid shiplap walls, that also double up as cabinet doors. Lastly, as me and my wife were busy professionals, we hardly had time to visit the renovation. Aaron is hands-on and will be on-site almost every day supervising the contractors and updating us via WhatsApp images in the evening of the progress thus far. This gave us the assurance of a professional who is overseeing the project on our behalf. We hardly had to tell the contractor anything as all has been pre-decided and planned between Aaron and us. Finally, an important point, we signed the contract with Fuse Concept before the Covid-19 lockdown in March. We were worried that the renovation which was to start in June (when we got the keys to the house), would see an increase in cost, due to a shortage of labour, workmen etc. However, our concerns were put to rest, when Aaron assured that the cost would remain the same as the one we had signed in March. This was a huge sigh of relief! The project exceeded our timeline, partly because we had to factor in a 2-week delay as the gas pipes in the apartment had corroded and City Gas needed to shut off the gas of the entire apartment block while changing the corroded pipes in our unit and installing a new pipeline into our apartment. We insisted in using City-Gas as we were sick of getting canned LPG gas from private vendors. We knew we will spend a lot of money in renovating this house as we wanted the house to reflect our personality and the generation that we came from. Also we will be retiring in this house and we one to renovate our place to the extent that we don't have to renovate anymore - that it meet our needs today till our old age. So, to be safe and to protect our investment, we needed an interior designer who understands our thinking and is also current on what the industry has to offer in terms of materials, trend-ideas, furniture and equipment. Aaron Chong was all of these and many more. He never got upset, was never flustered even when we changed some plans over and over again, he always delivered in the project milestone chart and kept his promises. I strongly recommend Aaron Chong of Fuse Concept. Thank you. Kamaludin Bahadin If you are keen to see the before and after pictures of our renovation, you can visit me on Instagram at @kmaludin