Seletar Hills was laid out over what had been a rubber plantation, and it still carries the width of a place built when there was room to be generous with it. The roads curve instead of running straight. The trees went in long enough ago to meet overhead, and Ang Mo Kio Linear Park runs along the southern edge of the estate. Life moves at the pace of a place that finished deciding what it was a long time ago. The walk from the car to your own front door is quiet in a way a lift lobby never manages.
The everyday here runs on short drives. Greenwich V is four minutes out for the groceries, the clinic and the coffee. The Seletar Mall is six, with the supermarket and the cinema for a weekend that needs filling. Chomp Chomp Food Centre, the one in Serangoon Gardens that people have been driving to for forty years, is nine, and Jalan Kayu and its prata about twelve. Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, the big one with the river running through it, is around fourteen. None of it is far.
Getting into town is straightforward behind the wheel. The Central Expressway reaches Raffles Place in about seventeen minutes, with the Seletar and Tampines Expressways close by and the North-South Corridor still under construction to steady the run in. Ang Mo Kio and Yio Chu Kang stations are both roughly ten minutes by car, and the Cross Island Line is being built through Serangoon North, about six minutes from here. A car is the assumption at this address, and the house is drawn on it, with porch room for two of them and the charging points already laid.
Indoors, the house expects to be rearranged. The family room lifts nine metres overhead. Five ensuite bedrooms hold a growing household, then a shrinking one, then a visiting one, and the lift keeps every floor in use at every age. Terraces open off the living spaces so the outside belongs to the house instead of being looked at from it. There is a cupboard at the entrance sized for golf bags and shoes, and a gateway in the wall that locks the doors and starts the air conditioning from a phone. Underneath all of it runs a lease with more than eight centuries left on it. The house will still be standing here long after everyone who chose it.