Life between work and play

Across a typical weekday in Singapore, the boundaries between work, leisure and daily routines blur quickly. A resident might start the morning in a café beneath a mixed-use tower, move to a co-working floor within the same district, spend the afternoon in a neighbourhood hotel lounge and end the day in a compact retail precinct.

The projects recognised in this year’s PropertyGuru Asia Property Awards (Singapore) capture this shift. They show a city refining the interface between private and public life, and designing settings where use, identity and community operate in step. These trends align with broader planning aims around decentralisation, integrated mobility and more accessible everyday amenities, reinforcing the city’s long-term push toward well-connected, experience-driven districts.

Mixed use development is central to this evolution. Union Square Residences, named Best Mixed Use Development, represents a more civic-minded interpretation of integration. Homes, retail and public-facing spaces are stacked and stitched together to support continuous activity, with residents, workers and visitors sharing the same ecosystem of amenities. In a city where reducing friction has become a planning priority, Union Square offers a model for how movement, convenience and public life can be brought into closer relation.

A more compact expression of this idea appears in Odeon, winner of Best Lifestyle Commercial Development. Its curated frontage and lifestyle-oriented tenant mix create a distinct presence at street level, illustrating how commercial buildings are shifting from transactional spaces to neighbourhood anchors. By foregrounding atmosphere, identity and public engagement over size alone, Odeon reflects a broader recalibration within Singapore’s commercial landscape: smaller-scale projects that contribute meaningfully to local character.

Hospitality follows a similar trajectory. Social on Outram, recipient of the Best Boutique Hotel Development title, shows how hotels are increasingly woven into the districts they occupy. Rather than operating as sealed-off destinations, boutique properties are becoming part of local life — engaging with nearby businesses, opening up to their streetscapes and offering a more intimate, neighbourhood-rooted form of hospitality. Social on Outram demonstrates how scale, design and locality can be combined to create places that feel both grounded and open.

The rise of co-living extends these ideas into the housing landscape. Serene Living, managed by The Assembly Place, awarded Best Co-Living Space, reflects how the model has matured from alternative accommodation into a recognised part of the city’s urban infrastructure. Shared amenities, service-led management and community-focused programming offer residents a blend of flexibility, support and social connection suited to contemporary working patterns and mobile professional lifestyles. The model occupies a space between housing and hospitality, providing a calibrated level of privacy, convenience and community.

Taken together, these developments show how Singapore’s commercial, hospitality and mixed-use environments are being reshaped around experience rather than programme alone. Integrated districts are adopting a more civic orientation; compact commercial buildings are reinforcing neighbourhood identity; hotels are acting as cultural and social catalysts; and co-living has become a form of flexible, community-centred accommodation that complements the city’s wider planning goals.

As work, leisure and living continue to overlap, the next phase of Singapore’s urban evolution will be defined less by the height or scale of development and more by the quality of experience these hybrid settings support. The most meaningful innovations will come from the places that bring these activities together with clarity, intent and character — the environments where city life feels connected, accessible and distinctly Singaporean.