Award-winning terraced house on Watten Drive going for $5.68 mil

An intermediate terraced house on Watten Drive has been put on the market for sale by private treaty. The house is owned by the architect who designed and rebuilt the old house for his family a decade ago. He continues to live there with his wife, a private banker, and their daughter. “While it’s a terraced house, we have designed it in such a way that it feels like a semi-detached house,” says the architect, who declined to be named.

One of the walls of the house was tilted slightly, resulting in a wedge-shaped gap between the house and the common wall shared with the neighbouring house. The gap allows the architect to have windows on that wall, allowing natural light and fresh air into the house. A lap pool was also slotted into the space. “Most terraced houses tend to be long and dark, with the interiors lit mainly by artificial light,” explains the architect. “Rather than introduce a courtyard, which would have been predictable, we decided to bend the wall slightly, prying it away from the common wall so that slivers of light could illuminate the interiors.”

The house was deliberately designed with a clean, white palette so that the architectural lines stand out. And it has several other interesting features. A sculptural “floating spiral staircase” surrounded by water stands next to a powder room that leads directly to the lap pool. There is also a built-in “triple-storey height bookcase” starting from the first...