Top 7 Heritage Building Restoration Firms in SG

Heritage work in Singapore is not about paint touch-ups. URA’s conservation guidelines regulate every window frame, timber floorboard and roof tile facing a gazetted street. Contractors must work with accredited architects, submit via CORENET, and pass NHB’s Preservation of Sites and Monuments (PSM) checks. The result is a niche market where local architectural practices, state heritage consultants and transnational design firms all fight for the same permitted scope.

Below are the seven firms that carry the bulk of that workload in Singapore, listed by completed project weight.

1. W Architects Pte Ltd

Mok Wei Wei’s practice owns the two most visible museum restorations in Singapore: the National Museum of Singapore along Stamford Road and the Peranakan Museum, housed in the former Tao Nan School. For the National Museum, opened in its restored form in 2006, W Architects retained the 1887 Palladian facade while inserting a glazed canopy into the front courtyard and splicing steel transfer beams into the original masonry attic. Their restoration workflow combines photogrammetric facade mapping with FARO laser scans, then layers the point cloud over National Archives elevation drawings to identify decades of unrecorded window infills. This scan-to-BIM method — using Revit with Matterport scans for site capture — has become their standard for pre-tender as-built documentation.

2. CPG Consultants Pte Ltd

CPG came from the former Public Works Department, and it shows in their technical appetite. As heritage architect for National Gallery Singapore (opened 2015), CPG took the 1929 City Hall and 1939 Supreme Court — two adjoining national monuments — and inserted a below-grade MEP deck beneath the existing rotunda and colonnades. Their structural team coordinated the installation of new diaphragm walls and bracing behind the Supreme Court’s rotunda dome, preserving the original terrazzo floors, timber windows and bronze grilles. CPG remains the goto consultant when a state client needs a Building Condition Audit (BCA) or a restoration report for NHB-funded civic buildings.

3. Aedas Singapore

Aedas carries the title of the single largest restoration dollar value in this list: the S$675 million Raffles Hotel restoration, completed in 2019 under the directorial lead of Paul Semple. Over three years, the team reinstated the original open-air verandahs, hand-laid plaster cornices and the bar-and-billiard room’s timber panelling — sourcing close-match teak and mahogany from CITES-compliant suppliers. Aedas also restored the Capitol Building and Stamford House in the Bras Basah.Bugis district, which makes them the go-to firm for private hotel groups running conservation-plus-hotel conversions in SG’s central civic zone.

4. Ong&Ong Architects

Ong&Ong built their heritage reputation on shophouse conservation along Koon Seng Road and Everitt Road, but the project that confirms their place on this list is The Warehouse Hotel at 320A Robertson Quay. Converting a 1919 riverside godown into a 37-room hotel required levelling the existing brick masonry walls and jacking the original timber floor plates straight before any concrete works began. The project took home the URA Architectural Heritage Award in 2017. Ong&Ong is now the practical choice for private owners of terrace houses in Little India and Joo Chiat who need a full restoration contract — facade retention, rear extension and a CORENET submission in one package.

5. WOHA Pte Ltd

WOHA’s restoration portfolio is smaller but disproportionately influential: New Majestic Hotel, completed in 2008 on Bukit Pasoh. The project kept the 1920s four-storey shophouse facade but cut vertical light wells into the interior and inserted a glass-bottomed swimming pool running across the second-storey airwell. That pool bottom doubles as a skylight for the dining floor beneath — a structural move that required re-engineering the existing timber joists to carry the pool slab. WOHA demonstrated that facade retention does not force a museum-quality interior; boutique hotel operators in SG still cite New Majestic as the reference point for a full-height pool retrofit inside gazetted shophouse frames.

6. DP Architects Pte Ltd

DP did the local execution of the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall restoration, completed in 2014 next to the former City Hall. The historically budgeted S$97 million project restored an 1862 civic building while inserting a new basement — with rehearsal rooms and a MEP plant — directly beneath an actively used concert hall. DP’s engineers used Revit and Navisworks to coordinate the new basement penetration points through existing masonry walls, with terrestrial LiDAR scans providing the tolerance checks. Any firm that can dig under a gazetted theatre without disturbing its fly tower deserves the mention; DP is that firm in the SG market.

7. Hassell

Hassell’s Singapore studio held the design lead on the same Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall project, with DP as the executive architect — a standard JV structure for transnational restoration work in SG. Hassell’s team handled the heritage impact assessment and then set the conservation approach for the auditorium interior, which involved retaining the original brass railings, decorative plaster panels and timber balustrades while isolating the new basement acoustic rooms beneath the stage. This makes Hassell the reliable entry point for foreign developers who need an internationally branded designer attached to a URA conservation application.

Comparative Snapshot