CHAPTER EIGHT
EMERALD HILL, SINGAPORE
Since separating from Michael, Astrid had moved in to one of the heritage shop houses on Emerald Hill Road that she had inherited from her great-aunt Mathilda Leong. As Nick strolled down the street toward her place, he couldn't help but stop along the way and admire some of the ornamental friezes, timber-framed windows, and elaborate entrance gates on the beautifully restored Peranakan-style terrace homes that made this street so unique.*1 No two façades were alike-each one blended different elements of Chinese baroque, late-Victorian, and art deco details.
When Nick was a child, many of these shop houses where old Peranakan families lived and worked had fallen into neglect and the street had an air of faded grandeur, but now that real estate prices had shot up to absurd levels and the neighborhood had been designated a conservation area, these houses had become highly coveted properties going for tens of millions. Many of them had been turned into hip bars or sidewalk cafés, leading some of Nick's snootier relatives to derisively refer to Emerald Hill Road as "that street where all the ang mor kow sai go to leem tzhiu,"*2 but Nick found it all rather charming. Arriving at a handsome white shop house with smoky gray shutters, he stopped and rang the doorbell.
A blond girl in her early twenties peered over the pintu pagar-an ornately carved wooden half door that was a typical feature of such houses-and asked in a heavy French accent, "Are you Nicolas?"
Nick nodded, and she slid the lock open to allow him to enter. "I'm Ludivine, Cassian's au pair," she said.
"Salut, Ludivine. Ça va?" Nick said with a smile.
"Comme ci comme ça," Ludivine replied coquettishly, wondering why she'd never met madame's hottie French-speaking cousin before.
Stepping into the front foyer, Nick could see that the room had been painstakingly restored to its original style. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of ceramic tiles painted in a William Morris –esque floral pattern, and intricately carved gilt wood screens created a partition between the front room and the rest of the house beyond. The centerpiece of a typical Peranakan front room was the ancestral shrine, and Astrid had honored the tradition by installing an elaborate Victorian altarpiece against the back wall. But instead of placing pictures of dead relatives or porcelain gods within the altar, she had cheekily hung a small Egon Schiele drawing of a nude male figure inside.
Ludivine led Nick from the front foyer through a darkened antechamber into the chimchay-the open courtyard exposed to the sky that provided the natural ventilation and lighting essential to these long, narrow shop houses. Here, Astrid had departed from tradition and completely transformed the space: The roof had been glassed in and the entire space air-conditioned, while the usual concrete floor was now covered in obsidian black tiles, making it shimmer like a pool of black ink.
But the pièce de résistance was the east wall of the courtyard, where Astrid had worked with the pioneering French landscape architect Patrick Blanc to install a vertical garden that soared three stories high. Creepers, ferns, and other exotic palms seemed to grow out of the wall, defying gravity. Against this dramatic fresco of flora was a sleek arrangement of sculpted bronze divans covered in soft pillows of blindingly white linen. There was a verdant, monastic stillness to the space, and in the midst of it all, Astrid perched cross-legged on a divan, nestling a cup of tea on her lap, Zenly attired in a black tank top and a voluminous black skirt.*3
Astrid stood up and gave Nick a tight hug. "I've missed you!"
"Same here! So this is where you've been slumming it."
"Yeah, you like it?"
"It's incredible! I remember coming here as a kid for one of your great-aunt's nyonya feasts-I can't believe what you've done with it!"
"I moved in here thinking it would just be temporary, but I ended up falling in love with the place so I figured I'd do some work on it. I can feel my great-aunt all around me here." Astrid gestured for Nick to take a seat next to her on the divan, and she began to pour him some tea out of a cast-iron teapot. "This is a Nilgiri from the Dunsandle Tea Estate in South India … I hope you like it."
Nick took a sip of the tea, savoring its delicate smokiness. "Hmmm … fantastic." He gazed in wonder at the ocular-patterned skylight far above. "You've really outdone yourself with this space!"
"Thanks, but I can't take any credit for it-Studio KO, this amazing Parisian duo, designed everything."