Sugar, Steel and Teak

How did you find your way into furniture design and founding Studio Kallang?

I came to furniture design from an education in visual communication and grew up in a family who are furniture manufacturers, where I spent much of my teenage years learning on the job.

Instead of studying industrial design, I thought it would be better to learn from another angle and then combine it. I love visual communication – fashion, textures, colour. It's helped a lot, especially getting through the first couple of years of Studio Kallang because I could do all the branding, website and marketing.

What's the story behind your studio's name?

It's based on the industrial neighbourhood of Kallang in Singapore where both Studio Kallang's warehouse and my family's business warehouse are located. It's not a glamorous or cool neighbourhood but I love it because it's a rare part of the city that still feels like 'old Singapore'. I thought it was funny to name a collectible design studio after Kallang, playing with the contrast of two different worlds.

Much of your work centres on bridging the gap between high and low culture, why are you interested in this?

My parents shaped how I view the world.

My mum was a businesswoman in the furniture industry and my dad was an academic and interested in everything. He exposed me to lots of things and was always telling me "everything is an art form, everything you do is an art form". I rolled my eyes when I was younger but now see that in everything too,

even in things like cooking or posting on Instagram. I learnt to have a curiosity for different things and to understand that ideas and knowledge can't be compartmentalised, they don't only exist in one space.

How does this curiosity play out in your design process?

My process is pretty intuitive and about paying attention to things.

I usually start with a bunch of sketches, drawing on the reference bank of everything I've ever consumed until something clicks. It's like the visual equivalent of word vomit – putting it all out there then slowly starting to make conscious, rational decisions through an editing process and computer modelling.

There are lots of little decisions, like whether to swap steel for brass, for example.

From there it is about working with the factory and craftspeople in Java. It's this back and forth of me trying to push my ideas – which are informed by my background in visual communication rather than industrial design – and them pushing back with what's structurally feasible. At the end of the day, the pieces have to exist in the real world.

One of the first pieces you launched was the Onde Mirror. I understand it's still one of your favourites, why the fondness?

It's special because it's one of my first and it's also one of the pieces that got a lot of attention for the studio. Then, there's the fact that it uses a universal motif of an alternating black and white pattern that follows me everywhere and that I find that comforting. When I travel to Europe, I see remnants of this chess-board-like pattern on the streets and in fancy Parisian bistros, visiting Indonesia I see it in the vinyls on restaurants.

Finally, the current Onde series' name and forms are inspired by a really fun South East Asian dessert called Onde Onde which I loved as a kid as it almost pops in your mouth. Traditionally it's green and uses coconut flakes and a regionally-specific sugar called gula melaka.

How have people responded to your furniture pieces named after sweet treats?

In the beginning I think it was a shock for people – maybe not in the West because they didn't know what I was talking about – but for people in Singapore, because people don't usually associate those colloquial references with luxury or higher-end design. It's kind of an inside joke that challenges perceptions of value.

I like to add humour to my work because that's something you don't see a lot of in the verified spaces of design. I grew up in a pretty political household, we'd talk about politics, class hierarchies and decolonial issues. I think the names are my way of tackling that in my work without falling into self-seriousness.

Many of your pieces are made from timber, what draws you to this material?

Timber is beautiful, especially teak. My use of it is influenced by the craftspeople I work with in Java. Wood has been their primary material for over 100 years. They are woodworkers first but, because we have a pretty established relationship, we've slowly been introducing new materials, like resin, and new techniques, expanding what is possible to produce. I'm always looking to find ways of introducing more colour through other materials because I hate painting solid wood, it feels wrong!

Your Mamun No 2 side table for Milan Design Week in 2025 is a good example of bringing different materials together. How did it come about?

A lot of my pieces are iterations of previous work and this one was based on a side table I'd made in 2024. I added a steel base and green Morisco glass¹, which is a patterned glass that you see in a lot of South East Asian shophouses. Sometimes I stumble upon materials and end up incorporating them. In this case, working in Indonesia, there's a lot of vintage Morisco and I found the green sheets that feature in that piece.

This glass is pretty interesting because it has a repeated quatrefoil² motif with a complex history. No-one can pinpoint where quatrefoil² came from – some people trace it to the UK's Gothic Revival Era when there was a lot of rolled sheet glass production, others say it goes back to when the Moors were more present in Europe. I am interested in the universalism of that motif and how it's travelled through cultures to become a staple in South East Asia, especially with British colonisation. The steel, meanwhile, was informed by my first Milan Design Week in 2024 – I was blown away. I loved how the Milanese use industrial materials in a way that still feels really fun and chic.

The practice of iterating is interesting and you customise pieces for clients too, yes?

Sometimes people come to me and go, 'I really like this piece, but I like the colours of this other piece, can you combine them?'. It's funny, I feel that most designers wouldn't do that – it's like it's sacrilegious. Even in design school we were told "don't Frankenstein your work", but I think it's more fun. You get new things from a more collaborative process with clients and audiences, and the studio grows as a result of being part of that environment.

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^{¹ A textured architectural glass featuring raised, repeating patterns.}

^{² A decorative shape made from conjoined semi-circles.}