Home Under Renovation

On the 26th of March, Home will close its doors to the public to go under a new phase in the club’s ongoing evolution. The renovation will take place until the 12th of April, after which there will be a soft launch held at Beat! on Friday the 13th. I urge readers to envisage a new space focusing on practicality combined with integrity, true to the Home of old but perhaps best described as, closer to form.

Never to be complacent with what Home has already achieved, we look forward to expanding into further achieving the club’s intentions and incorporating design features that will set the club another step further apart from the rest of Singapore’s nightclubs and venues. Supporting the local community in the arts is a firm design brief that will be the backbone behind the intentions of utilizing the space to the best of it’s ability. Once design is complete Home endeavors to incorporate an even wider range of events, from galleries, exhibitions to providing theatre space to hold performances.

Those now working on the project have termed Home’s independent style as ‘rojak’; a vernacular coining that outlines Home’s current designs and interiors, which permeate into its multidisciplinary range of events. Rather than come up with a new look that clash with a system which already works, the concept is simply an extension of the old, making the space more flexible and conducive to what Home’s intentions are as a club for it’s own and the greater community. Taking inspiration from local everyday aesthetics, architects have used ideas from an assortment of Singapore’s own structural design. Ranging from bar concepts taken from the features of the islands own Mama shops, column treatments in the lower levels of HDB flats and screen concepts from common washing line designs, these are only a few of a variety of influences, both vague and specific, absorbed from our local vistas.

There is one detail pertaining specifically to the interiors that appealed to me as an observer. This is the use of hybrid furniture. This will be simply as the term suggests, reusing old furniture, repainting and then combining parts or the entire piece into something new. Not only is it incredibly practical but it also cements the notion of the venue as a communal space made for those who come to feel more at Home, to be part of something that is physically theirs. For someone not part of the design process this became an insight into how exactly this concept was being put into practice.

Much time, thought and deliberation have gone into preconceiving the new space with a final desire to increase its visual personality and add functionality to the design. The prospected changes for Home will rejuvenate its unique spirit. The intention is to not only retain the Home that we have all come to love but to empower the individual as a part of its identity.