Touring the Springside: A freehold self-contained landed estate with not a tall building in sight

This week, I headed over to the Springside area to have a look at the freehold landed houses there. A 532-house enclave developed by Kallang Development, it is located along the beginning of Sembawang Road (right after Upper Thomson Road ends).

I must confess that the area is a little further out than I had expected – it’s about a 10-minute drive from Teachers’ Estate and Meadows by Peirce which I reviewed a while back. 

As you can see from the URA Map below, it’s a rather untouched area. There’s a large piece of Special Use Land to the Northwest (the dark green area), several plots of reserve land to the North and East (the yellow area), Springleaf Park and Sungei Seletar to the South and another (smaller) housing estate (the orange area) and more reserve sites to the West.

Despite the fact that Springside is located so far away and in quite an undeveloped part of Singapore, it didn’t feel like an inconvenient place to live at all, thanks to several rows of shophouses and two small mixed developments right next door (The Brooks 1 and 2, also by Kallang Development).

In fact, it felt like quite a nice and quiet self-contained village: you have tuition centres, cafes, and restaurants right at your doorstep, so you can just stroll out for classes, a family meal or to wind down with a drink at the end of a long day.

There’s a bus stop along The Brooks, which is just a stone’s throw from the landed houses, and this will take you to Springleaf MRT. There are two bus stops – you have a choice of four buses (167, 169, 860, and 980) or a 10 minutes walk away.

So, strictly speaking, you could get by living here without a car. It wouldn’t be the most convenient but it’s not as impossible as some of the other landed estates. I’m not sure about Sembawang Road, but Upper Thomson Road which is just a little further down gets very jammed on weekday mornings (peak hour).

From the number of MindChamps units, I’m guessing a lot of families here have young children. The estate was very quiet when I visited though. I went in the evening and even the playground was empty. (In contrast, it was pretty rowdy when I visited Pavilion Park, another landed estate that’s, shall we say, also not the most centrally located?).

Next to The Brooks 2 is a Caltex petrol station, so you could always grab urgently needed supplies from its convenience store and you’ll never have to worry about filling up your tank.

And next to Caltex is Hong Heng Mansions, which has more commercial units, including a Parisilk Electronics & Computers, Laundry Shop/Dry Cleaners’ (sadly with a not very favourable Google rating of only 3.3) as well as Famous Kitchen (which, according to their Oddle site, is Michelin Plated).

The interiors are a little dated but I like that there’s more al fresco seating outside. With Covid-19, open-air dining is now my best friend!

Yet more shops and restaurants across from Hong Heng Mansions, including Habits, a restaurant bar that looks like quite a yuppie place to dine (and has a 4.9 rating on Google from over 120 reviewers! Wish I had checked it out now).

There’s also another laundry shop here, but it has no reviews so I’m not sure if it’s any better than the one at Hong Heng Mansions.

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Anyway, see what I mean about how the Springside area has almost everything you need? Sure, it doesn’t have a shopping mall very close by.

You’re in between two malls (about an eight-10 minutes drive to Thomson Plaza and Sembawang Shopping Centre) but now that Netflix has replaced the cinema and Amazon is killing off the high street, the absence of clothing shops & a movie theatre nearby isn’t a dealbreaker, in my opinion.

The only fly in the ointment is that I can’t figure out where the closest wet market or supermarket is.

There is a durian shop and a Mart at The Brooks, but sometimes you just want a massive grocery store to go crazy in, although I guess that’s not so much of an issue these days as well with GrabMart, Red Mart, NTUC delivery, etc.

FYI: Sembawang Shopping Centre has a Giant, ValuDollar, and Watsons whilst Thomson Plaza has 7-11, Fair Price Finest, and Yes to Healthy Life (a convenience store, if you were wondering).

However, both places are over an hour’s walk (1h 15 minutes and 1h 30 minutes respectively), so not exactly places you can just nip into without a car if you’ve run out of something.

Anyway, enough about the shops and back to the actual houses!

This is what you see if you stand on the main road, in between The Brooks 1 and 2, and look into the landed estate.

Note that it’s one car lane for entering and two for exiting. This may seem insufficient for the number of houses but there’s another entry point into the estate (Springside Road) where there’s a mosque located. There’s also a Presbyterian Church next to the estate, so it’s convenient for Muslims and Presbyterians who live here.

Here’s the other road into the estate (Springside Road). It’s quite a long road FYI so you can drive in but it’s not that convenient to walk out from this way.

Back to the other entrance (between The Brooks). The downside of having shops next to your houses is parking. I’m guessing The Brooks has a tiny car park (as the sign said full) so there were tons of cars parking along the road beside The Brooks. In fact, there was a small jam when I was turning in, as the parked cars were blocking the way! 

Or maybe the parked cars belonged to the residents, as it wasn’t easy to find a space to park at the Springside. Not the worst estate so far but I definitely don’t want to visit during a festive period.

Also, because the estate has many turns (as you can see above), the parked cars made driving around the estate a bit of a hassle (you can’t see around the corners.)

I didn’t see many dustbins being used to reserve parking spaces here, but the cars were parked pretty close to each other. This is probably not the best photo as the space in front of the white car is okay but there were some which made me worry about the drivers getting their cars out later!

The houses were launched successively, so they are built in different styles. 

I find these terrace houses very clever. Can you see how there’s a gap between the top floors of some of the units? This way, even though they’re inter-terrace units, you get light coming in from the sides of the house too and the interiors aren’t as gloomy as the typical terrace unit!

And semi-Ds. What’s interesting is that most landed estates segregate the property types (all the terrace houses on one road, the semi-Ds on another, etc) but here they seemed kind of jumbled up and you get different property types facing each other.

Note also how some houses have very generous distances between the backyards...

Whilst others... don’t?

I love the large windows of these houses, though they’re probably not great for privacy. Which may be why the curtains appear to be drawn during the day!

And this is something I’ve never seen before: These houses (along Springside View, if you’re wondering) seem to have their own private road (on the left of the photo) that’s parallel to the main road? Makes it very convenient if you have more than one car and increases the distance to the opposite house, so you get better airflow and light!

And this one appears to be built in the European castle style, complete with its own turret! (There are several units with similar round towers so it appears to be the developer’s design).

If you’re wondering about the prices, there was a corner terrace at Brooks Signature for sale (at the time of writing) for $4.88 million.

There were at least 10 terrace houses sold in the Springside area in 2022, with prices ranging from $2.93 million to $4.398888 million whilst current asking prices (at the time of writing) span from $4.38 million to $6.48 million. (2022 rental contracts range from $4,300-$7,500).

Another thing to note about this area is the multitude of parks it has. Opposite Springside estate, there is Springleaf estate, which is where Springleaf MRT is located (about 500m away, two bus stops or slightly over 10 minutes’ walk away.) The two estates are separated by Sungei Seletar and Springleaf Park.

In addition to Springleaf Park (which is quite large), Springside also has its own Brooks Park and Springside Park.

As mentioned, this estate, even the playground, is a quiet one!

Springside Park appears much larger as it has a lot of open land around it. 

There’s a tall monument behind the playground but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Some of the houses around Springside Park have the advantage of being single loading (i.e. they don’t have a row of houses behind them), at least for now. Besides the ones in the photo above, there were at least two more rows of houses that were single-loading. 

A piece of land with old buildings opposite some of the houses. I couldn’t figure out what the land was used for as there were no signs and it was fenced off, but I believe the church is located behind it.

Last but not least, as always, I like to share photos of interesting houses that I see on my tours!

Now that we’ve come to the end of our tour of Springside, how did you find the estate? Because of Springside’s far-off location, I was surprised by the number of amenities in the vicinity as well as how in-demand the houses are (based on the number of sales in 2022, as well as the prices).

Having seen the area in person, I can see how it would be a very nice place to stay if one worked in the area and had friends and family living nearby (so one can socialise without having to trek into town).

Join me again next week for a tour of Gerald Drive – it’s been requested by more than one reader so I figured I should finally get round to it! 

This article was first published in Stackedhomes.