Influencer Couple Turned Their 5-Room HDB Into A 1-Bedroom Home With A 100-Inch TV

Most couples who get a 5-room HDB flat would probably be pretty happy with three bedrooms.

Actor and content creator Braven Yeo, 29, and lifestyle influencer Tiara Ong, however, looked at theirs and had other ideas.

The couple's 1,216 sq ft Sale of Balance Flat (SBF) originally came with three bedrooms.

SBF is a housing sales exercise offering leftover and unsold new flats directly from HDB. Unlike a BTO launch, which limits applicants to flats within a specific project, an SBF exercise allows buyers to choose from available flats across different towns and estates.

Braven and Tiara knocked down one bedroom to expand their living room, then combined the remaining common bedroom with the master bedroom to create one supersized bedroom complete with a walk-in wardrobe.

"So, it's actually initially 5-room, so three bedrooms, right? But we knocked down one of the bedrooms to combine with the living room, yeah. Then the other two bedrooms, right, we also combine. So technically it's like a 1-room flat now!" Braven said during an episode of Kaypoh Room Tours.

Well, that's one way to make a 5-room flat feel even bigger.

For Tiara, the idea was to make their home feel as open and connected as possible.

"I think we just wanted everything to feel very open and spacious. So like even if you're in different rooms, like kitchen or like dining or living, right, you can still feel like you can talk to each other," she explained.

And with its Brutalist-inspired interiors, stainless-steel kitchen and enough smart-home features for host Amy Ang to remark that she felt like she was in a "tech showroom", their place doesn't exactly look like your typical HDB flat either.

Think lots of grey and steel, punctuated with pops of colour, particularly Tiara's favourite: green.

And with an entire bedroom sacrificed for a much larger living room, the couple had enough space for a suitably massive centrepiece: a 100-inch TV.

Even Braven initially wondered if they had gone overboard.

"Yeah, at first I thought it was a bit big, so, but then when I sit on the sofa and I watch the TV, right, actually it looks like just nice," he said.

There was just one small problem: They hadn't checked whether the TV would actually fit into the lift.

"So because like the lift... like we didn't think about this at all! So on the day of the delivery, when the guys were at the lift, they say the TV cannot go in the lift! It's either they carry up the stairs or they have to remove it from the box,” Braven recalled.

The couple are also big on smart-home tech. All their lights are smart, but simply controlling them from their phones would apparently be too basic.

Braven and Tiara have even programmed different lighting "scenes" for different board games.

"We are a bit extra, we created like different scenes for different board games, if you have friends who play board games and Dungeons & Dragons, yeah, it's like that kind of vibe!" Braven said.

The tech continues in their walk-in wardrobe, where the couple installed one of their clothes rails right at the top to maximise storage space.

"Because like we wanted to maximise space, so we really moved like the top rod, right, all the way up," Tiara explained.

The rail can then be lowered whenever they need to grab something.

"Yeah, so it makes it very easy for you to like grab stuff, pull back stuff, you know? Then you don't need to like reach and take chair," she said.

But for all the gadgets, clever storage solutions and aesthetic choices, Braven says their biggest consideration when designing the home was actually pretty straightforward.

"Because a home is a very personal space, so I think you need to really reflect on what you want in the house and what are your living habits. Because the space should not only be aesthetic, it should be functional, because you are living there every day," he said.