A Condo Owner Refused To Remove An Unapproved Balcony Installation For 5 Years — Here’s What The Court Decided

It took a five-year legal battle – starting with a tribunal order, a District Court order, and a fresh application to the courts – before the management corporation of Sea Esta could finally remove an unauthorised glass curtain from a unit’s balcony.

In a judgment released on 10 September 2026, District Judge Jonathan Ng Pang Ern finally granted the management corporation (also known as the MCST) of the condo the court order it needed to get the job done.

Sea Esta is a 99-year leasehold condominium on Pasir Ris Link. The 376-unit development was completed in 2015.

This legal tussle caught our attention because it’s a precautionary tale for any owner tempted to renovate before getting the relevant approvals, and for any MCST wondering just how far it has to go when an owner simply won’t budge.

A tribunal order that took five years to bite

This five-year story began when Daniel Leigh Taylor and Sangeetha Taylor, the owners of a unit at Sea Esta, installed a solid glass curtain on their balcony. The MCST considered this unauthorised and brought a case before the Strata Titles Board, a tribunal set up specifically to hear disputes between owners and their MCSTs.

That case ended in September 2021 with an order both sides had agreed to. The Taylors were to remove the glass curtain within six months and were allowed to install Ziptrak blinds instead, on condition that they submitted a renovation application within two weeks and the MCST responded within two weeks after that.

But the homeowners missed that first deadline, filing their application a month late.

The MCST rejected it as incomplete, then rejected the next few for the same reason, and was still rejecting applications when the Taylors submitted their last one in March 2022, twelve days after the six-month removal deadline had already passed.

With the glass curtain still up and no acceptable application in sight, the MCST went to the District Court in June 2022 to have the tribunal’s order enforced as a judgment. That took another year to arrive, in June 2023, with the judgment repeating the same removal and bound the terms, adding $9,000 in costs against the Taylors.

But even that order didn’t seem to be able to spur the homeowners into action. The MCST sent reminder after reminder, and the Taylors submitted no further applications at all.

But the MCST had the law on its side

By December 2024, the MCST’s patience had run out enough to send its own representatives in to carry out the fix directly. A domestic helper working for the tenant blocked the door and called the police.

The MCST then filed another legal application in April 2025, asking the court for an injunction – an order that would stop the Taylors, and their tenant Xu Xiaoyan – from blocking entry or the removal work itself.

Its legal basis sat in three provisions of what was then called the Building Maintenance and Strata Management Act, renamed the Building (Strata Management) Act on 1 October 2025.

1. No changes without approval. A subsidiary proprietor can’t alter anything that affects a building’s appearance without the MCST’s sign-off.
2. The MCST can step in. If an owner won’t fix a breach, the MCST is allowed to carry out the work itself.
3. And it can let itself in. As long as it gives notice first, the MCST can enter the unit to do that work.

District Judge Ng found the glass curtain was unauthorised, period. The Taylors argued the 2021 order was just something both sides had agreed to, and was not a real ruling against them. 

But that argument didn’t persuade the judge: the order still came from a tribunal whose decisions can be enforced just like a court judgment, so there would have been no reason to issue it if the curtain had never been a problem.

None of the three provisions actually states that the MCST can ask a court for an order like this, but Judge Ng held it was the only way to make them work in practice. Without a court order behind it, the MCST’s powers to fix the problem itself and to enter the unit would count for nothing whenever an owner simply refused to open the door.

The Taylors’ defence was that the MCST had deliberately withheld approval by piling on “never-ending requirements”, along with claims of bad faith and bias, but the judge called this a guess, unsupported by the evidence.

Evidence was also presented in court, which included a letter from the MCST’s lawyers dated 5 March 2022 which spelt out exactly what was missing. No renovation plan had ever been submitted with any application, and only in that week’s filing, six months after the tribunal order, did the description of the works even mention removing the glass curtain at all.

Moreover, in his written judgement, District Judge Ng noted that the order had only required the MCST to respond to an application within two weeks, not to approve it. So, there was no evidence either that the MCST’s requirements were unusual or applied only to the Taylors.

Being a tenant didn’t keep her out of the lawsuit

In between all of this, the homeowners leased out the unit to a tenant, Xu Xiaoyan. But this tenant wasn’t named in the tribunal order or the 2023 court order. She rented the unit from the Taylors as their tenant, and had no part in the original glass curtain dispute.

But it was her domestic helper who blocked the MCST’s representatives at the door in December 2024 and called the police.

District Judge Ng eventually held Xu responsible for that, which meant that she found herself looped into that lawsuit as well. It goes to show that an injunction against the Taylors alone would do nothing if their tenant’s household could still bar the way.

Adding to the tangle, the Taylors had given two people power of attorney to run the unit’s affairs for them. One of the individuals happened to be their lawyer in this case, and they, in turn, hired a property agent to actually handle the removal work.

But the judge found that none of this changed anything: the Taylors, as the named parties in both orders, remained personally on the hook for complying with them.

In response, the Taylors and Xu filed a counterclaim with nine separate requests, asking the court to force the MCST to approve their applications, to strike Xu out of the case entirely, and to dismiss the whole application with costs in their favour.

But the counterclaim was barely mentioned in their written submissions, and their own lawyer needed reminding at the hearing that it still existed.

So the judge dismissed it outright. Four of the nine requests were already answered by his rulings on the injunction, the defence, and Xu’s status. The remaining requests asked for something the law didn’t allow, or sought a result that a counterclaim like this couldn’t be used to accomplish.

In the end, the court granted the injunctions the MCST asked for and ordered the Taylors and Xu to pay a further $8,000 in costs, plus GST, for this application. Between the two rounds of proceedings, they now owe the MCST $17,000 (excluding GST) in costs – not to mention their own legal fees and the removal cost of the glass curtain that kickstarted this whole affair.

What five years of delay actually cost, and why the fight isn’t over

In his closing remarks, district Judge Ng measured the delay in two ways. From the tribunal order, the Taylors had defied a legal obligation to remove one glass curtain for almost five years, and from the District Court order another three years.

He wrote that the delay “made a complete mockery of the authority of the DC Order,” and described the Taylors’ conduct as moving from apathy and incompetence at the tribunal stage to outright defiance once the District Court became involved.

It was also noted on the public record that almost as soon as Judge Ng delivered his oral decision, the Taylors’ lawyer asked the court to hold off on enforcing it until they could appeal, before there had been any chance to hear, let alone consider, the reasons behind it.

To the judge, that suggested the Taylors had already decided to appeal any outcome that went against them, regardless of what the court actually said. They have since filed that appeal to the General Division of the High Court.

Strata litigation like this has landed in the courts more often than we think. A previous termite infestation claim against an MCST left them more than $42,000 out of pocket after the case, and another defamation suit over basketball hoop netting went all the way to the High Court.

All three cases really come down to the same question: how far an MCST’s authority actually reaches, and what it costs everyone involved when someone decides to test it.

For any owner weighing whether to install something first and sort out approval later, the lesson here isn’t really about the glass curtain. It’s that winning in court doesn’t mean the other party listens.

Whether the Taylors eventually comply will depend on what the High Court makes of this case.