The Sunday Telegraph (Stella) April 2008

Words by Dinah Hall.

To use Sparing words in keeping with the spirit of its minimalist architecture, Voon Wonng's flat is small but perfectly formed. In fact, it is so perfectly formed it wouldn't occur to you that it was small until Wong points out that the ground floor is only 750sq ft and upstairs just less than the half that.

Wong, an architect who came to London from Singapore 23 years ago to study, bought the unit as a shell in a converted school building ten years ago. Although the appeal of these old buildings is the lofty ceilings, the proportions are more difficult to work with than you might imagine, which is why the standard solution - sticking in a clumsy mezzanine with a spiral staircase - always looks so disappointing.

Wong's unique and elegant solution was to use the original steel girders to suspend the mezzanine, as he didn't want supporting columns downstairs. The proportions and balance are so sensitively tuned that what could have been an oppressive bulk in this restricted space instead seems to float. Because of the way the structural beams divide the upper space, it was not possible to have a staircase going straight up, so it divides in two, neatly branching off left to a study area and right to the bedroom.

As he gone to all that trouble to avoid columns breaking up the floor space, Wong says it 'made sense to suspend the kitchen, too - though of course he's talking architectural rather than financial sense here. This Kitchen in-a-box hangs from the ceiling, leaving a clean sweep of floor underneath, which preserves the perception of the space being open-plan while still allowing a sense of separation. And when someone is working in there it transforms from pure, rational modernism to something unintentionally hilarious - a box on legs.

If you sit on the sofa you can just see a pair of feet sticking out from underneath the kitchen. 'Footwear's very important', Wong remarks wryly as his marketing director, Ian Macready, steps in to the box and demonstrates the sartorial folly of wearing brown shoes in a flat that has a glossy black floor. Wong painted the original parquet, which was a 'horrid orangey pine', with Farrow & Ball floor paint.

Macready gets his revenge by revealing details of Wong's excessive tidiness - though it has to be said that, in terms of a revelation, 'tidy architect' is on a par with 'Catholic pope'. Until a year or so ago Wong's architecture and design practice was based at the flat. 'So you'd come in, in the morning', recalls Macready, 'and find everything on your desk has been straightened and lined up.' The clothes hanging in exact symmetry on the drying rack in the bathroom back this up - you'd need a spirit level and tape measure to replicate that kind of precision. And if you needed further proof that Wong is an architect, check out the immaculately folded T-shirts in his dressing-room, a riot of...grey, black and white.

'Oh, I don't mind controlled chaos', protests Wong, though his idea of chaos is probably a mug left out on the kitchen counter - in which case he could control it by closing off the kitchen with its sliding panels. He is not, however, a dyed-in-wool minimalist - while he could hardly accused of cluttering the place, he does have some beautiful objects and furniture. Some of these betray his addiction to Ebay, but others are designed by his company, which he co-owns with Benson Saw, a product designer. They have recently produced some beautiful bone-china dishes and are now designing a new factory for the company in China that makes them.

Their Slicebox is a deceptively simple table - four different cuts through a wooden cube enable the table to be fitted together like some kind of IQ test, or to be used as separate occasional tables. Other bits are picked up on his travels in the Far East - the curiously angled kettle, sole object on display in the kitchen, which looks like a prop from a Fritz Lang film, came from a Malaysian market.

Colour is used architecturally rather than decoratively, with a couple of walls painted in what he calls 'muddy colours' to emphasize depth and perspective - though he adds bright splashes with the bright-green 1970's Artemide dining chairs. 'Too much colour would be overpowering; you have to take it in small measures', he says in his typically quiet, analytical fashion before suddenly confounding all stereotypes. You might think this flat fits him perfectly as a shell fits a snail but he has his sights set on living in a Victorian house. Rooms! Doors! Pure heresy.