Singapore — The mysterious estate owned by the family of Nick Young, the male lead in Crazy Rich Asians, may soon become a luxury residential development worth billions of dollars.
The jungle land, which is near UNESCO World Heritage site Botanic Gardens, is owned in real life by Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, the Crown Prince of Johor.
According to a Sept 26 Bloomberg report, representatives for the Crown Prince are in confidential discussions with authorities to develop the land, which is vacant, into an enclave of homes for the wealthy.
The report further says that the development would be one of the most expensive in Singapore, possibly costing as much as S$4.5 billion, Bloomberg said, quoting a Savills Plc estimate.
The 210,875 square-meter area, which is near Orchard Road, is said to be 30 times the size of The White House. It is also designated for “special use of green space,” which means its development is restricted.
Within the park lie what remains of Istana Woodneuk. The ancestors of the Crown Prince built the palace in the 19th century, but the structure was “ravaged by fire and decay” over time.
A 2019 Fortune article describes the area in this way: “Just down the road from the U.S. embassy and bordering condos worth S$4.5 million each, the swathe of untended jungle hides the remains of two abandoned palaces and would be worth a cool US$3.5 billion if sold for development, according to one estimate.
In a city where almost 8,000 people are crammed into each square kilometer and real estate prices are among the world’s highest, it is one of the greatest urban anachronisms in Asia.”
At present, Singapore’s housing market is on the up and up, with S$32.9 billion in sales from January to June of this year, “its biggest frenzy in more than a decade, and double the level recorded in Manhattan over the same period,” Bloomberg notes.
Rumours of the land being developed started in 2020. However, neither the representatives of the Johor royal family, nor the Urban Redevelopment Authority, have made a statement about plans for development, and declined to comment on the matter.
In ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ the land is the setting of Nick Young’s ancestral home, where his ah-mah lives. However, the house featured in the hit movie is located in Malaysia.
“The house as it appears in the movie was actually filmed at two abandoned mansions that make up Carcosa Seri Negara within the Perdana Botanical Gardens of Kuala Lumpur. Interior scenes were filmed at one building, and the exterior scenes were filmed at the other,” according to fancypantshome.com. /TISG
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