Leaderboard

you will need to have 2m set back at the back and sides as well as 7.5m set back at the front. so technically your buildable area becomes 10m x 25.5m which gives you 255sqm for the ground floor. assuming the house is in a 2 storey landed housing zone, you can build another storey plus an attic level above. so if you decide to max out your available floor area is 255sqm (ground floor), 255sqm (2nd storey) and 185sqm (attic). attic is assumed to have a further 3.5m setback both front and back from the building's foot print. of cos if you decide to do a pitched roof for your attic, this area will become bigger if the area under the pitched roof is taken into account. since your architect told you needs to be 1m above ground, it has to be as this means your house is in a low lying area and the house needs to be raised up to prevent flooding. the level above ground is determined based on a relative level which is the Singapore Datum. if your house is below this datum, it will need to be raised above this datum level hence the 1m. BUT the "good" thing is that URA can consider this 1m to be a basement and your building height is then calculated from this 1m level. of cos there are other guidelines which need to be adhered to for this basement. a basement would cost you another 400k to 500k of construction cost. a lot of the money will actually go into providing for Earth Retaining Stabilising Structure (ERSS) which is a temporary structure to prop the ground while it is being excavated. since you are already in a low lying area, this is much more important since you have a high chance of your house being on clay like soil. If you want a basement, the only way is for you to tear down and rebuilt. If you can forgo the basement, then you could build a pool in the existing house within the current 2m setback. of cos if you are planning to dig anything more than 1.5m for the pool, you might need to do ERSS as well to prevent the soil from collapsing during the building of the pool. Budget wise, I guess it depends on if you are doing a reconstruction or new built. a new build could cost you 1.5M without basement. Then again, it depends on what type of finishing you are looking at. if you want to have marble or granite everywhere in the house, be prepared to fork out more money for the natural stone. edit: forgot to mention that you will need to check if there is a public sewer running through your land. if there is and the current house isn't built over the sewer but you wish to build your house over the sewer, you will need to build a RC trench to protect this sewer. This RC trench can cost you about 50k to more than 100k depending on how deep your sewer is and how much it is within your plot.