Have you ever seen a property ad that is in, say Holland Village, but is marked as Lorong Chuan on PropertyGuru? Well, I’ve seen, like, hundreds of such ads and always wondered why Lorong Chuan was the default address when the agent was too lazy/forgot to put in an address.
Well, it’s also one of the 2 MRT stations near Braddell Heights Estate, a landed enclave that a reader requested a tour of a few weeks back. (The other MRT station is Serangoon MRT at Nex shopping mall, FYI.)
Braddell Heights is a nice landed estate that consists of terrace houses, semi-Ds and some quite sizeable detached houses. At the time of writing, the cheapest house for sale, a corner terrace, was still asking for $5.888 million, whilst detached houses were going for up to $28 million!
Example of the terrace houses – these are mostly located towards the East of the estate, where there is also a short row of shophouses with some nice places to dine, such as Babba and Wimbly Lu. (I’ve not eaten there so, by nice, I mean they look nice and have good Google reviews and am not speaking from personal experience!)
This is what the row of shophouses look like. (Babba is right at the far end so not visible from here.) Where the blue truck is, there’s also a seafood shop called Dishthefish which I’ve seen pop up on my Instagram feed many times.
I visited the estate on a Sunday evening and the shophouses weren’t too busy. There were people dining in the restaurants, but it wasn’t too crowded and it wasn’t difficult to find a parking space.
(The orientation is basically: basketball court on the left of the photo, further left than that is the row of shophouses, behind the court are more houses and to the right of the photo (beyond that white fence we see, yet another row of houses!)
Oh, before I forget, the houses here are pretty close to Yang Zheng Primary School, Zhong Hua Secondary and Nanyang Junior College. They’re sort of separated by condos such as Golden Heights, Sunnydale and Maranda Gardens.
So, for parents, there are several educational institutions in the vicinity! Although I’m not sure whether the traffic and noise will spillover to the landed estate when it comes to school pick-up and drop-off times.
There is also St. Gabriels’ Primary School towards the Western end of the estate, behind Chiltern Park and Chiltern Drive.
I had to take this shot to show that the dustbins are where they would ideally be – in front of the houses, and not on the roads!
View of some of the houses. You can see many are still not plot-ratio-maximised at 2 stories, with the newer builds standing out as giants.
As you can see the pavements here are nice and broad. It’s pretty easy to walk on, and not cluttered by pots and gardening!
The land is rolling, so some houses are elevated above others. This one looks like it would be pretty nice and windy, despite being a single-storey unit!
Having said that, I must say that one thing about this estate is that turning out can be a bit tricky. When you turn out at Lynwood Grove, you don’t get a very good view of the oncoming traffic (and there is quite a bit of it.) Thankfully, there are several roads that lead in/out of Braddell Heights, so you can always try your luck elsewhere!
If you don’t care for the MRT, there’s a bus stop here, where you can find Buses 73, 105 and 159.
And then you’re back into the estate, proper. This part has much larger houses!
If you want to see a video walk-through of some of the more expensive parts of the estate, click through to this YouTube video.
Now that we’ve finished our tour, how did you find the area? I was pleasantly surprised! I thought it would be really rowdy (because of the large roads) but it’s really peaceful and quiet inside!
Before I go, I have to mention another thing about leaving the estate. To get from the estate to town, according to Google Maps, you need to do a U-turn, which some people may find a bit of a pain. Alternatively, you can drive through the Bidadari area to get to the highway, but it’s quite a bit longer and I can see the it getting jammed during peak hours.
If you’re curious, this is a map of what we covered – quite a large distance, as you can see!
Here’s the Master Plan of the area for those who would like to find out more. Do note that there are 2 large plots of land just South of the area. One has been zoned residential but is subject to detailed planning, whilst the other is a reserve site (i.e. there may be an increased supply of homes in this region in the future.)
This article was first published in Stackedhomes.