Nomad House: A Singapore Tower That Splits Digital Nomad Living into 150-Person Villages

Freedom is the selling point of digital nomadism, and loneliness is its hidden cost. Nomad House starts from that tension. Instead of treating the co-living tower as a stack of apartments with a coworking floor attached, it asks what a building must provide when its residents carry their jobs in a laptop and their address changes every few months. The answer is a vertical ecosystem where working, sleeping, eating, playing and meeting strangers all happen within the same structure, broken into communities small enough for people to actually know each other.

Designed by Kamil Grecki and recognized as a Shortlisted entry in NomadHouse 2020, the proposal imagines Singapore in 2030, a city where remote employment has become widespread and nomadism has matured from an alternative lifestyle into an established form of urban living. The brief is speculative, but the social problem it targets is already familiar to anyone who has lived out of a suitcase.

Two Green Towers Rising from a Shared Podium

The aerial view establishes the urban stance: two slender towers lifted above a low podium, their balconies thick with planting, set among plain white massing blocks. The greenery does more than soften the silhouette in a tropical city; it signals that the outdoor edge of each floor is meant to be occupied. The podium grounds the scheme as a mixed-use base with commercial and public functions, while the towers carry the residential and work programme upward.

This is the first of two scales Grecki works at. From the street, Nomad House reads as a major high-rise capable of housing a large population. From inside, the intent is the opposite: to dissolve that population into clusters so that the tower never feels like one anonymous mass.

An Amphitheater as the Third Place

The courtyard rendering captures the project's most important idea in a single space. Stepped concrete seating forms an informal amphitheater beneath cantilevered floor plates, and people sit, talk and dance around a red-leafed tree. This is the "third place" the project relies on: neither home nor office, but the room in between where residents rest, exchange ideas and form relationships outside professional routines.

Grecki treats this layer as an architectural requirement rather than an amenity. Each Nomad House unit combines residential floors, work areas and a dedicated third place level, so social space is built into every community rather than concentrated in a single lobby that most residents pass through without stopping.

Stacking Hotels, Campsites, Libraries and Drone Pads

The colour-coded sectional axonometric is where the programme becomes legible. Floors labeled hotel, camping, workspace, library and restaurant are distributed through the tower and podium, capped by drone landing levels that point to the project's interest in mobility. The reading is of a vertical city rather than a residential block: a resident might work in the morning, collaborate in the afternoon, eat and unwind in the evening, all without leaving the building, while short-term visitors check into the hotel floors.

The plan and elevation sheet, drawn at 1:600, grounds the diagrams in a buildable footprint. The north and west elevations confirm that the planted balconies run the full height, and the ground and second floor plans show how the podium absorbs the public and commercial programme. Underlying this organization is a clear number: residential modules of roughly 150 people, a scale chosen to encourage stronger interpersonal connections. It is a smart constraint. Large enough to sustain shared facilities, small enough that faces become familiar.

Campsites and Lawns in the Sky

The landscaped levels turn the tower's rhetoric of freedom into something tangible. One rendering shows a lawn garden with a pitched tent, a man asleep in a hammock and a red maple, flanked by facades covered in climbing greenery. The camping floors are a playful answer to a serious question: how do you house people who value spontaneity and short stays? You give them ground, even if that ground is many storeys up.

The curved, glass-railed terrace extends the same logic to everyday socializing. A small group chats on the grass with the city's white towers in the distance, a scene that is deliberately unremarkable. That is the point. These terraces are where casual encounters accumulate into community, and they give each cluster an outdoor room of its own.

Why This Project Matters

Most co-living proposals solve for efficiency: smaller units, shared kitchens, a coworking floor to justify the rent. Nomad House solves for belonging. By organizing the tower into 150-person communities, each with its own work areas and third place, Grecki addresses the core weakness of both high-rise housing and nomadic life, which is anonymity. The building's mix of hotel, camping, library, restaurant and terrace programme is ambitious, but it is held together by a social logic rather than a list of amenities.

The proposal leaves open questions, particularly around how residents move between clusters and how the drone levels would function in practice. Yet its central argument is persuasive and increasingly relevant: when work no longer anchors people to place, architecture has to supply the connections an office once provided. Nomad House treats that responsibility as the brief itself, and that is why it earns its place on the shortlist.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Kamil Grecki

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Project credits: Nomad House-digital Nomads center in Singapore by Kamil Grecki NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).