Organised by the Interior Design Confederation Singapore (IDCS), the Design Excellence Awards (DEA) bestows accolades to interior design projects in Singapore and around the world on two tracks: the Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) for professional industry practitioners and the Spatial Design Awards (SPADE) students. 

This year’s edition of DEA received a total of 180 entries from 14 countries across the two competition tracks. The Award’s gala night this week at St Regis hotel saw 54 IDEA winners in 28 categories and 36 SPADE winners in nine categories.

The highest project accolade of the night, the ‘IDEA Project of the Year’, went to the Nissan Crossing Experience Centre in Tokyo, designed by Tim Kobe of Eight Inc. The project was lauded for providing a high-tech sensory experience, balancing its interior with the architecture, and a virtual facade that stands out in its context at Tokyo’s glitzy high-end Ginza district.

 
Above: Nissan Crossing (Tokyo) by Tim Kobe of Eight Inc. was awarded ‘IDEA Project of the Year’ 

Young boutique interior design firm LAANK, helmed by designer Cherin Tan, was honoured as the ‘Emerging ID Firm of the Year’. The firm was praised for its keen understanding of branding in interior design, and for crafting highly curated spatial experiences. “No two spaces designed by LAANK are alike, yet they exude the same sense of familiarity in the way the customer’s experience in the space is curated,” said jury member Pann Lim of Kinetic Singapore.

 
Above: O+ by LAANK, ‘Emerging ID Firm of the Year’

Meanwhile, the highest accolade in the SPADE track, the ‘Best Student Award’ was given to Richard Tsang of the Bartlett School of Architecture, for the Reykjavik Film Institute, a design proposal of a film school built inside a basalt quarry on the abandoned island of Viðey in Iceland.

Above: Reykjavik Film Institute by student Richard Tsang, winner of the ‘Best Student Award’

Starting from this year, the DEA honours not only one, but three winners for ID Firm of the Year. Winners of the ‘Top 3 ID Firms of the Year’ category (“In no particular order”) were Metaphor Studio, Wee Studio and Hong Kong-based One Plus Partnership.

Said jury member William Lau of A.Alliance Design International: “The winners of the ‘Top 3 ID Firms of the Year’ have unique profiles, charting completely different directions. Metaphor Studio is meticulous in details and highly versatile, with diverse gymnastic capabilities to switch design themes from earthly to contemporary, chic to cultural; One Plus Partnership is a rare firm who revels in avant-garde, surreal and out-of-this-world ideas being implemented in real life; while Wee Studio is loaded with ideas to optimise and double up space utilisation, which are important criteria in our land-scarce Singapore.”

Above: Guangzhou Jinye Cinemas by One Plus Partnership (one of the ‘Top 3 ID Firms of the Year’ )

The gala night also hosted main sponsor AkzoNobel’s announcement of its 2018 Colour of the Year. Heart Wood is a complex colour that blends grey, pink and brown hues that aims to capture the essence of ‘a welcome home’.