Star Bamboo Singapore

This month’s issue of Female Magazine had a short article about local celebrity Nadya Hutagalung’s eco house project:

I had the pleasure of meeting Nadya last week as she wanted to find out more about our eco-friendly bamboo flooring.

Yes she is indeed gorgeous in person, and positively glowing in her pregnancy.

Blame the noisy acoustics at the cafe, it was only upon reading this article that I realised how far she wanted to go with her eco-house project – do read the article for more details.

Just to highlight 3 of my favourite bits:

1. Use of eco-friendly materials

When the media highlights eco-friendly developments, it usually focuses on energy and water-saving systems. That’s a good thing of course, but people have neglected to add eco-friendly building materials into the equation.

Nadya will be using recycled, renewable, sustainable and even low-VOC materials in her house. Rather comprehensive.

2. Rainwater catchment tank

Nadya is installing a rainwater catchment tank to collect rainwater. I’m not sure if it’ll be fully integrated into the toilet flushing system. However, that would be an expensive proposition.

Now, we have various metal barrels around the house to collect rainwater for watering the plants. Unsightly, but it gets the job done.

3. Organic look

Nadya’s house is designed to blend in with the natural environment e.g. exterior walls covered with creepers.

I agree with this whole-heartedly. Too often, houses in Singapore stick out like a sore thumb.

Being eco-conscious means being able to co-exist in harmony with the natural environment. This should extend to the design as well.

Eco-architecture should not pummel nature into submission, but rather, the two should come together in an harmonious blend.

If you’d like more information on Nadya’s eco house, check out her husband Desmond Koh’s blog.

Well, I still can’t help fixing it.

The old contact form was working OK, but I felt it could deal with the re-direction “thank you” page more elegantly. It did seem a bit odd to have it as a separate page. You could access it even without having to fill in the form.

Luckily WordPress is such a flexible and well-supported platform. After researching a few different options, I finally settled on this contact form plug-in.

Check out our spanking new contact form! And while you’re at it, do drop us a message.

And I couldn’t just stop at a simple form, I had to revamp the look of the web site as well.

Again, with WordPress, it’s a simple matter of using an appropriate template.

I’ve settled on a simpler, 2-column layout, in response to feedback that the web site seemed too cluttered.

The colour scheme is still green, but it does seem much tidier now.

Hope you like the new look.