A LIVING HERITAGE
Long before this tower took shape, the site was home to a modest two-storey guest house known to the neighbourhood simply as Five Star — a place of welcome, rest, and quiet hospitality. Though the old structure makes way for the new, its name and spirit are not discarded; they are carried upward. The concept behind Five Star Heritages was precisely this: to honour the memory of what stood here by allowing its identity to live on in a building that grows where the old one once rested.

This idea of continuity — of something inherited and carried forward rather than erased — shapes the architecture itself. A sober, enduring blade wall stands as the building's quiet backbone, grounding the form and housing its vertical circulation. From this anchor, the principal façade opens into a sequence of stacked terraces, shelves of greenery spilling over their edges with vines trailing softly across every floor line. The old guest house offered warmth at the scale of two storeys; the new tower offers that same sense of welcome, now reaching toward the sky.

Read from the street, the building becomes a contemporary reinterpretation of the hanging garden — ordered, rhythmic, and unmistakably alive. Behind this green veil sits a glazed inner skin, giving residents uninterrupted daylight and views while remaining shaded and screened by the planting before them. Each level receives its own layer of nature, a threshold of calm between the interior and the busy city beyond — an echo of the hospitality the original Five Star was known for. The composition culminates at the crown, where a rooftop garden sheltered beneath a slender pergola returns a shared retreat to the residents, high above the place where the story began.

CONSIDERATIONS

The design treats sustainability as an architectural strategy rather than an afterthought. The layered planters that define the front façade are not purely decorative; they function as a continuous green shading device, intercepting direct solar gain on the most exposed, street-facing elevation while still admitting filtered, comfortable daylight to the interiors. The cascading greenery cools the immediate microclimate, reduces glare, and lowers the building's cooling load.

The quieter side and rear elevations are kept comparatively solid, with controlled openings that minimise unwanted heat gain and reduce the energy required for temperature regulation. The rooftop garden adds a further layer of thermal insulation while returning amenity space to the residents. To sustain this extensive planting responsibly, a water treatment system recycles grey water for landscape irrigation, closing the loop on water use.

Cost efficiency has guided the structure as much as the aesthetics. A clean, regular grid frame with optimal floor-to-floor heights keeps construction straightforward and economical, while the restrained use of glazing on the less favourable elevations contributes to both energy and cost savings. Wherever possible, locally available materials have been specified — strengthening the building's economy and its connection to the place it calls home.