Cluny Hill Good Class Bungalow GCB Review – District 10, Singapore

All 39 GCBAs in Singapore are equal in prestige, but some are more equal than others. This can be attributed to several factors such as convenience, exclusivity, average plot sizes etc. Amongst the areas which tend to be at the top of this desired list would undoubtedly be the Cluny Road / Park / Hill GCBA. If you need proof of that, just check out 4 Cluny Park, which starred in the movie Crazy Rich Asians as Goh Peik Lin’s house. It’s been repainted with a fresh (strange) set of colours since then but retains “that” opulent gold water fountain.

Wrapping around our first UNESCO World Heritage site, the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Cluny Rd and Cluny Park Rd connects Bukit Timah Road on one end to Napier Rd / Orchard on the other. Cluny Park and Cluny Hill are both hilly and winding while Cluny Rd and Cluny Park Rd are flat and tend to have more traffic flow. The ‘Cluny’ name could either be attributed to Capt Jacob Clunis, a blacksmith and shipwright operating out of Telok Ayer or from the Cluny Castle in Scotland (information adapted from Robert Powell’s ” Singapore Good Class Bungalow 1819-2015″ ISBN 978-981-14-0844-1)

Among the more prominent transactions the past few years, billionaire James Dyson purchased a 15,100 sqft GCB at 50 Cluny Rd (not part of the Cluny Hill GCBA) for $41m ($2,715psf) in July 2019. The seller was Jason Lee, a director of Forte Global, a developer. If you think $41mil is alot, that’s only 0.25% of Dyson’s $16.2Bn net worth.

In March 2020, a 20,369sqft GCB was sold for $40mil ($1,964) to Han Xiaoli, the co-owner of Lobb Heng Group, a leading supplier of non-ferrious metals for export to China. According to a Business Times article, this GCB was part of 12 GCBs developed in the area by Straits Steamship Land (Keppel Land today) and was sold for $8-9.5mil each in 1994. That represents a 500% gain from its original price or 19%/year over the past 26 years. Mad gainz indeed.

Prominent previous and current owners at the Cluny GCBA are said to include Glenn Tan, Deputy Chairman / Managing Director of Tan Chong Motors, Tony Chew, Chairman of Asia Resource Corporation which has diverse interests in automobile, tobacco and F&B, Neil Parekh, Head of Asia and ANZ of Tikehau Capital, an asset manager with €27.2 billion AuM and lawyer turned banker turned filmmaker Li-Anne Huang.