Top 7 Heritage Building Restoration Firms in SG

Singapore’s conservation estate sits at roughly 7,300 buildings across the 22 URA historic districts, plus dozens of gazetted National Monuments. Restoration here is an engineering problem as much as an architectural one: tropical UV, termite activity, acid rainwater, and the mismatch between lime‑based historic mortars and modern Portland cement consistently cause facade spalling and timber failure. The firms below are the ones actually running 3D laser surveys, matching 19th‑century Minton tiles, and getting lime putty approved by URA.

1. RDC Architects

Practicing since 1966, RDC owns the reference project for colonial hotel restoration: the 1990–91 Raffles Hotel rehabilitation. That job involved dismantling and rebuilding the hotel’s 1910–1915 facade form, replacing decayed Chengal timber beams in the Palm Court, and relaying the original encaustic floor tiles rather than substituting replicas. The firm followed it with the Old Hill Street Police Station (now MCI), recreating 927 louvered windows, and the CHIJMES chapel restoration in the 1990s. They maintain an in‑house documentation unit that records mortar profiles and paint chronologies before structural demolition, which keeps URA submissions clean.

2. Studio Lapis

A boutique conservation consultancy, Studio Lapis focuses almost exclusively on heritage fabric rather than new build. Their working list covers Chinatown, Little India, and Emerald Hill shophouses, with a “minimal intervention” stance: lime‑based plaster repair, hand‑profiled mouldings, pigmented limewash, and restoration of original twakow plank doors. Where standard contractors would rake out and patch with cement, Studio Lapis runs on‑site paint‑layer analysis to recover the original 19th‑century pigment schemes needed for URA facade consent. They are commonly retained by individual owners, not only developers, which gives them a niche in small‑lot conservation compliance.

3. W Architects

Mok Wei Wei’s practice is the default name for museum‑grade adaptive reuse. The 2006 National Museum of Singapore project retained both the 1887 neoclassical wing and the 1906 wing while dropping in a new basement and a glazed canopy between them. Structurally, the firerelied on raking steel frames and low‑vibration demolition to stop cracking in the original brick vaults. The same team converted the former Tao Nan School into the Peranakan Museum, a job that tested their workmanship on Peranakan floor tiles, shuttered windows, and exterior plaster mouldings. Both jobs carried URA Architectural Heritage Awards.

4. RT+Q Architects

Co‑founded by Richard Ho, RT+Q specialises in turning obsolete industrial heritage sites into viable hospitality and residential stock. The Warehouse Hotel along Robertson Quay is the most cited case: the 1895 godown retained its four‑metre‑high brick walls and original timber roof trusses while a brand‑new steel and concrete core took the structural load. They did the same logic at the Rendezvous Grand Hotel, keeping the 1890s five‑storey front block and inserting a modern services spine behind it. For owners, the practical value is their willingness to engineer new structural grids inside old envelopes, which keeps URA’s facade requirements almost untouched.

5. DP Architects

DP’s Conservation and Adaptive Reuse unit handled the largest civic conversion in Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, which stitched the 1939 City Hall and 1929 Old Supreme Court into a single 64,000 sqm public building. That meant restoring Minton tile floors, the Supreme Court’s dome, and the original courtrooms, while also underpinning the historic column lines to build two basement levels. DP repeated the exercise at Capitol Singapore, restoring the Capitol Theatre’s 1930s plasterwork and integrating a new roof over the former arcade. Their value is in managing mega‑project budgets where the heritage portion is only one contract among many.

6. Swan & Maclaren

Founded in 1892, Swan & Maclaren is the only firm on this list whose own archive contains the original construction drawings for buildings it is now restoring. The practice designed the Raffles Hotel east facade, Goodwood Park Hotel (as the Teutonia Club), and the Old Hill Street Police Station. Today its restoration unit is used on colonial club and institutional buildings, most notably the Goodwood Park Hotel main block, where original plaster balustrades were recreated from period moulds and the glazed roof lanterns rebuilt. Access to their own 19th‑century specifications gives them a documentation advantage that competitors have to reverse‑engineer.

7. Arup Singapore

Arup is an engineering rather than architectural practice, but its Singapore office carries the structural and building‑physics load on several monument jobs. For National Gallery Singapore, the team designed the new basement by underpinning the existing masonry walls and used sliding‑bolt connections so the old and new structural grids could move independently under differential settlement. Arup also runs salt and moisture analyses on rising damp in old Masonry, which is decisive when URA asks whether a wall can be re‑plastered in lime or must be replaced. Heritage owners contract them directly when an architect’s restoration concept needs a structural safety case for BCA and NHB approval.