Jalan Tentaram — 4-Room BTO

The owners are a creative couple, and a BTO hands you a completely blank flat: no history, no character, nothing to work with or against. The usual answer is to paint it all white and hope the furniture does the talking. We went the other way and built the personality into the fixed elements, so the flat has something to say on day one and the couple's own things — the prints, the plants, the chairs they have collected — sit on top of it rather than carrying the whole load.

The kitchen is a stainless steel counter and splashback over teak veneer fronts, on a black-and-white patterned floor tile. Stainless is a working surface: it takes a wok, it takes heat, it does not stain, and in a kitchen that opens to the living room it reads as deliberate rather than industrial. The patterned floor is the one genuinely loud move in the flat, and it is in the room that can carry it.

The bedroom wardrobes are full-height shaker fronts sprayed sage green, with the track lighting left exposed above them. Shaker panelling is slower and dearer to build than a flat laminate door, but it gives a shadow line and a sense of craft that a flat front cannot, and it holds a colour far better. The green was the client's call and it was the right one.

Bathrooms are white metro tile with a black hexagon floor — cheap to buy, hard to get wrong, and it will age better than whatever is trending this year. Wall-hung WC and basin keep the floor clear so the tile runs uninterrupted. Everywhere else is deliberately plain: one grey tile through the living areas, white walls, and a single timber feature wall holding the television. The quiet is what lets the colour land.