Memories of Sentosa Cove

In July 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis started in Thailand with the collapse of the Thai baht, and eventually spread to other Southeast Asian countries. The ASEAN region – which prior to the crisis had been experiencing very high economic growth rates – was stunned by the financial impact, leading to social and political impacts such as the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. It was at that time that my younger self, oblivious to the major market changes around me, decided to leave Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC) and join a design consultant firm. I had wanted to be involved in a large master plan project, and the firm was designing something of a mega scale at that time. Unfortunately, the firm was also one of many firms that were affected by the Asian Financial Crisis. In a twist of fate one year later, I was given the opportunity to re-join Sentosa, albeit for the Sentosa Cove Pte Ltd (SCPL), and work on the Sentosa Cove Master Plan.

Canals, Marina and Other Waterfront Development Features

It’s not easy to make a tourism development financially feasible if it relies only on attractions. As all smart developers know, the attraction components should always be supplemented with real estate, not only in the form of hotels but also residential. This was one reason for the creation of Sentosa Cove, a 117-hectare premium waterfront housing enclave located at the eastern side of Sentosa Island in Singapore. My involvement with Sentosa Cove actually started earlier while I was with SDC, where a boardwalk that I designed (now demolished to make way for Resorts World Sentosa) became the mock-up for the Sentosa Cove marina boardwalk. I was only starting to discover waterfront developments at that time, after three years of learning about the planning and design of tourism destination, themed attraction and heritage conservation. At Sentosa Cove, I discovered the roles of seawalls, canals, locks, bridges and marina in the master plan, and learnt how to make them work in the plan. Among others, the team found out that a canal which is tidal and publicly accessible from the sea has to be deeper (due to the minimum draft for vessels required at low tide), while the plots adjacent to such canal are required to have a greater canalfront building setback (due to the Foreshore Act). Not only will a canal at low tide often look less attractive, but taller canal walls also translate to more expensive canal walls. Tidal canals may also have to be wider if the design of the boat ramps take up more horizontal space on water at high tide and impacting the area required for navigation. Wider canals translate to more expensive bridges. These factors influenced the management to go with a regulated and gated canal system, and while such system requires a lock, the benefits and returns far outweigh the cost in the case of Sentosa Cove.

Sentosa Cove Master Plan Iterations and The Public Realm Design

Waterfront developments that involve human intervention to the marine environment in the form of reclamation and dredging are quite a specialised field. As a special type of development, developers should select master planners and other consultants (as well as preferably the developer’s own in-house design and development manager) who are experienced in the development type. The selection of Bernard Spoerry as the first master plan consultant for Sentosa Cove came after a research on global waterfront places identified Port Grimaud – designed by Mr Spoerry with his late father – as a suitable model. It could be said that Sentosa Cove was first conceived to emulate the romance and fantasies of Port Grimaud. The places that influenced the development of Sentosa Cove were however not limited to Port Grimaud. Other examples, such as the Australian Gold Coast and Seaside in Florida, were also sought. A few years after the completion of the Spoerry master plan, ML Design (previously McKerrell Lynch Architects) was brought in to prepare a master plan review.

Subsequent to the ML Design master plan, there were other improvements made, and although the ML Design plan is generally the basis of the existing Sentosa Cove landform, there were numerous small master plan changes made by the management that required the SCPL in-house team to play the role of a master plan consultant. Among other things that I had to do were realigning roads, re-parcelling plots, preparing the plot test fits and the overall development massing, juggling the GFA and population, writing the development guidelines and preparing the master plan document for authority approval (note: increasing GFA and building height seemed to be a constant request). While it’s not as fun as preparing a fresh concept, it was still a worthwhile experience for a young architect and an aspiring urban planner. Perhaps more fun than this was my architectural and public realm design role in the project. I had been managing the work of consultants (including in developing the Sentosa Cove Arrival Plaza; an integrated office, retail, resident facilities and parking structure) and for a while, I didn’t have to do any architectural or landscape design myself. At one point however, the management decided not to continue with the sitewide landscape architect’s service, and I had to take over. Among the landscape structures that I designed are pavilions along the seafront.

Development Character, Development Guidelines and The Substation Showhouse

Aesthetics is one reason why an integrated development like Sentosa Cove is preferred by discerning buyers. It provides a streetscape which prevents ad-hoc additions and alterations to buildings over time, exercising a greater control over incompatible designs and protecting the value of homes in the neighbourhood. Determining the development character for Sentosa Cove and safeguarding it through Development Guidelines enforcement have been a journey as evident in the variety of designs built on site today. At the early stage of the Sentosa Cove master plan, the intent was to adopt a Mediterranean theme – like Port Grimaud – to create a tourism landscape. However, feedbacks received from local architects and developers prior to the launch of land sales were that this should be relaxed to include the contemporary tropical style. All these were considered to improve sales and it seems that the guidelines have been further relaxed since I left the company in 2006. If there is another development like Sentosa Cove, perhaps it could be stricter in controlling the development character. I remember that we looked at Port Grimaud and Florida’s Seaside and concluded that their popularity has something to do with their strict control of the traditional character and differentiation from the typical urban environment. The contemporary tropical style would also be perfect if every plot development adheres closely to it. I had a chance to experiment with it in the design of Sentosa Cove’s ‘Substation Showhouse’.

While each bungalow (single-family detached house) in Sentosa Cove was originally supplied with 100 amps 3 phase, the power supply available from the completed and operational 22 kvA substations in 2006 was found to be insufficient to meet the demand after more houses were built. The main reason was that the master plan power demand assumption did not take into consideration that many houses would be built with attics, basements, elevators, full-house air-conditioning and other excesses of wealthy people. It’s a lesson learnt that while there is only height control and no maximum GFA control on bungalows in a country like Singapore, the master plan should have assumed that the wealthy would squeeze in features like attics and basements. New substations were then required and of these, I designed the first one to look like a bungalow, complete with its own car porch, patio and boat berthing. This ‘Substation Showhouse’, along with a surprise request for me to multitask as the Acting Marketing & Communications Manager in one of the Land Sale exercises, wraps up my journey in Sentosa Cove before I moved to Dubai to work on two of the Palm Island trilogy.