“The Initial Sama,” from Singapore-based design and architecture firm Cover Projects, sits in a leafy part of Singapore, near the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and down the road from the city’s botanic gardens. Yet while the almost-70-year-old building sits near a university, the co-living space, which opens in July, isn’t targeting students, nor the executives that normally pick up serviced apartments.
Instead, Lim Keong Wee, founder of Cover Projects, is focused on a different kind of clientele: medical tourists.
“We first were quite taken by the Evans Road building being a heritage building,” Lim says. “Then we did our research and thought wellness tourism has the potential to grow even bigger and much faster.”
Lim was so confident in his analysis that his company outbid all other competitors for the plot by almost 50%, offering to pay a monthly lease of 265,000 Singapore dollars ($201,000) to the Singapore Land Authority.
Lim explains the building’s proximity to private hospitals and a large botanic garden gives Cover Projects a strategic advantage when it comes to wellness tourism.
“The opportunity was very rare,” Lim says, “hence we were quite aggressive with our bid.”
In particular, he sees the space as adding capacity to two nearby private hospitals, providing a temporary living space for patients who still need post-op care, who can now live in the co-living space and free up hospital bed space.
Lim first got the idea for “The Initial Sama” when he noticed a rising number of medical tourists at one of his other properties, “The Initial Residence”. Cover Project’s other co-living spaces are targeted at the usual clientele of college students and expats. Yet Lim noticed that “The Initial Residence,” based in the city’s Balestier neighborhood, was reporting a rise in stays from people seeking treatment at a nearby medical hub.
Some hospital brands in Southeast Asia have also partnered with hotels and serviced apartment providers to provide space for international patients who need post-op care, and in the city-state, hotels and serviced apartments are also often located closeby to major popular medical facilities.
While Singapore is a popular destination for medical tourism in Southeast Asia, the industry has not grown to the same extent as neighbors like Thailand and Malaysia. Medical providers argue the strong Singapore dollar is increasing costs—including for accommodation.
Redeveloping older buildings
Lim positions his developments as part of an approach he calls “context-driven design,” which leverages heritage buildings in Singapore.
Cover Projects’ first development was “Eighteen by Three,” which restored a shophouse in Singapore’s Chinatown and turned it into an international student hostel.
That was followed by “The Initial Residence,” a newer building located in one of the older and grittier neighborhoods on the fringes of the city center.
“The Initial Sama” is housed in a building that dates from 1958, five years before Singapore left the British Empire. The building was once a former college under the then-University of Malaya.
“Our general approach to any building from a design standpoint has to be what we call context driven. Understanding a building’s history gives us a glimpse of why the building was here,” Lim says.
Lim hopes to use design to draw people into spaces, which is perhaps why he’s focused on hospitality projects for his redevelopments.
“When we first started with shophouses, we found them to be very rich in culture, and history. We started to look at them from a lens of how design can rejuvenate spaces and ultimately allow people to discover the locale, or if not the building itself,” Lim says. “We started looking into multi-use spaces that’s very driven by experiences.”
A hospitality background
Lim is part of the founding family behind the Genting Group, No. 54 on the Southeast Asia 500. The company opened its first casino in Malaysia in 1971, and now operates resorts in Las Vegas, New York, and Singapore.
His father, Lim Chee Wah, is the youngest son of the founder of the Genting Group and formerly deputy managing director of Genting Berhad. Chee Wah’s brother is currently the chairman of Genting Group.
Lim explains that he had been exposed to the hospitality business from a young age due to his family ties. He subsequently moved to the U.K. to pursue a degree in architecture.
He later co-founded PAC, a design-focused firm, with fellow architect Victoria Loh in 2009. The firm was one of the master planner designers for Genting Secret Garden in Zhangjiakou. That resort was used to house a media centre, athletes, and delegates for the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
The two then founded Cover Projects in 2015 and focused on “boutique spaces,” as well as consulting for clients.
Those connections helped them get started in the wellness co-living space. “Working with other clients allows us to be nimble and explore other concepts. We’ve had clients in the wellness space and that gave us insights, which is why we then took the plunge and made a bid for Evans Road,” Lim says.
