Top 7 Heritage Building Restoration Firms in SG

Singapore’s conservation sector is not a playground for generalist fit-out contractors. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) enforces a strict Technical Conservation Guidelines regime — lime plaster must be replaced with compatible hydraulic lime, timber roof trusses need structural grading, and any new glazing inside a gazetted monument triggers a Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA). Developers, asset owners, and public agencies shortlist against track records of completed conservation projects, URA Architectural Heritage Award wins, and the ability to coordinate with the National Heritage Board (NHB).

Here are the seven firms that actually hold that track record in Singapore.

1. DP Architects

DP Architects is the largest firm on this list and the one that handles the heaviest civic conversions. Its track record includes the Fullerton Building (the former General Post Office, converted into The Fullerton Hotel in 2001) and the headline act: National Gallery Singapore.

The National Gallery, completed in 2015, merged the former City Hall (1929) and Old Supreme Court (1939) into a 92,000 sqm visual arts complex. DP’s scope involved strutted steel frames to suspend new galleries above the historic rotunda, restoring the Supreme Court’s three-storey dome using plaster casts taken from the original moulds, and integrating a basement link without disturbing the gazetted foundations. This remains the largest conservation-plus-adaptive-reuse contract in the country’s history.

2. Studio Lapis

If DP owns the large-scale conversion, Studio Lapis owns the delicate colonial-era restoration. The practice, led by Mona Ong and Jean-Francois Retat, handled two of Singapore’s most sensitive monuments: the Telok Ayer Market (Lau Pa Sat, 1894) and the Raffles Hotel main building.

At Raffles Hotel, Studio Lapis stripped back decades of paint layers to expose the original plasterwork, reproduced the verandah columns in reinforced concrete cased in traditional plaster, and restored the hotel’s glazed roof lantern. The Lau Pa Sat work involved dismantling and re-erecting the cast-iron structural system that had settled unevenly, a process done with jacking frames and laser surveys. Most URA-approved shophouse consultants in Singapore trace their methodology back to Studio Lapis’s 1990s fieldwork reports.

3. W Architects

W Architects, led by Wo Chan, specialises in museum-grade heritage buildings where the conservation work must coexist with climate-controlled exhibition infrastructure. The flagship is the National Museum of Singapore — originally built in 1887 as the Raffles Library and Museum.

The 2006 reopening brought the museum’s neo-Palladian wings up to Code, inserted a new glass-link corridor and basement galleries between the old wings, and restored the iconic central dome without altering the building’s external profile. W Architects also led restoration works at Goodwood Park Hotel’s 1900 Tower Wing, which involved replacing original timber windows with uPVC-compatible replicas and re-pointing brickwork with a lime-based mortar approved under URA guidelines.

4. RSP Architects Planners & Engineers

RSP’s name appears on almost every conservation feasibility study for large institutional compounds in central Singapore. Their most visible completed project is CHIJMES, the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (1854), which was restored and converted into a dining and events complex in 1996.

The CHIJMES scope involved stabilising the gothic chapel’s flying buttresses, restoring the courtyard’s original drain network, and converting the old school block into commercial units without altering the colonnade configurations. RSP also acts as a conservation consultant for private developers dealing with URA’s “adaptive reuse of conserved buildings” scheme, particularly for campuses and community clubs.

5. CPG Consultants

CPG Consultants is the direct descendant of Singapore’s former Public Works Department, and it still holds the public-sector heritage portfolio. CPG led the restoration of The Arts House at Old Parliament (1827), the oldest surviving government building in Singapore, converting it into a multidisciplinary arts venue while retaining the courtroom’s teak joinery and the original lime-based wall finishes.

On the religious monument side, CPG handled structural and material restoration works at St Andrew’s Cathedral (1861), including full replacement of the entrance podium stonework and repair of the cathedral’s stained-glass frame systems. For asset managers, CPG is the go-to for conservation audits and defect monitoring on buildings under the NHB’s Monument Maintenance programme.

6. Formwerkz

Formwerkz runs a smaller studio than the rest of this list, but it dominates boutique conservation work on private heritage homes and hillside residences. Its benchmark project is Alkaff Mansion (1923) at Mount Faber, restored in 2015 as a restaurant venue under a 99-year lease.

The project retained the mansion’s original terracotta roof tiles, reproduced missing Ionic column capitals from historical photographs, and embedded new services into the masonry with chases cut only into non-structural interior walls. Formwerkz also handles the growing segment of conserved wartime black-and-white bungalows in the Alexandra and Sembawang estates, where clients require compliance with URA’s “Countryside House” building typology.

7. MDP Architects

The Warehouse Hotel (2017) on Robertson Quay put MDP Architects into conservation circles. The building was a 1895 godown (warehouse) for the Straits Trading Company. Rather than gutting the interior, MDP kept the original timber roof trusses, exposed brick party walls, and the loading bay’s steel columns, inserting the 37-room hotel around them as independent steel-framed inserts.

This approach — “conservation by insertion” — is increasingly the standard for industrial heritage spaces along the Singapore River, where full restoration is impractical but demolition is prohibited. MDP has since been tapped for feasibility studies on other godown structures at Syed Alwi Road and Jalan Besar.

Comparative Snapshot

Note: For projects outside Singapore, these firms regularly export their civil engineers and conservation consultants to neighbouring markets — including Kuala Lumpur’s Sultan Abdul Samad Building restoration and Penang’s George Town UNESCO zone — but the core design teams remain registered with the Board of Architects Singapore.