Last week, I toured Frankel Estate (as requested by a reader) and noted how it had some similarities to Sixth Avenue. This week, another reader asked for a tour of Namly Estate, so off I went to Bukit Timah!
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Fun fact: Namly Estate even has its own Facebook page. I don’t live there so can’t say for sure but the area appears to have quite a good community feel. In Oct 21, they were looking for a Resident Volunteer to teach a Virtual Workshop during their Halloween party and, this year, they had a “Breakfast at Namly” event to celebrate National Day!
To hear from someone who actually lives there, check out this article in Expat Living. (I agree with the author about the construction - I saw quite a few houses and even parts of the road being rebuilt when I was touring the area!)
Location
Namly is located off the very busy Sixth Avenue but as it is very well-connected, people who live here can drive home by several other paths:
- From Second Avenue
- Turning off Bukit Time Road into Namly Avenue
- And Duchess Road, just to name a few!
And, as we all know, Bukit Timah is pretty central: you can drive to town, Holland Village or the CBD area very quickly.
There's no question about it, the houses here are expensive. They’re mainly semi-Ds and detached houses but there are a couple of smaller terrace houses around Namly Place.
At the time of writing, the cheapest houses I could find at Namly were $4.5-$5.5 million for 99-year leasehold properties (One of which had the dreaded West sun and was next to a place of worship (highlighted as potentially noisy on days of worship.)) (There was also a strata unit for $4.88 million and a terrace house for sale at $5.5 million.)
Note: if you like the area but have a smaller budget, there are a number of low-rise condos in the vicinity that you could consider, such as Sixth Avenue Residences.
If you don’t have a car, there are buses that do stop along 6th Avenue and the closest MRT is Sixth Avenue MRT. (The exact time taken to walk to the MRT would depend on which part of Namly Estate you live in but, according to my Google Map experiments, it appears to be a 15 minutes walk at the most.)
Schools
As everyone knows, Bukit Timah is lauded for its abundance of famous schools so for once, schools will be getting its own section in this article! Namly Estate is just down the road from Hwa Chong International School, Hwa Chong Institution (within which there is a Popular Bookstore) and SIM Management House (within which there is a restaurant, Table at 7.)
Walk out to Bukit Timah Road, cross the overhead bridge and you find Raffles Girls Primary, National Junior College and Nanyang Girls High School. A short drive away is Methodist Girls School (only 20 minutes walk from some part of Namly Estate!), Singapore Chinese Girls School and Anglo-Chinese School Primary. (SCGS and ACS are not really considered to be within walking distance in Singapore as they’re more than 50 minutes away.)
Note: I can’t say which Primary Schools are within the coveted 1km mark as it would depend on which street you’re looking at.)
Amenities
I like how there is a short row of shophouses at Namly Place (i.e. within the estate so you don’t have to walk out to the main Bukit Timah Road.) There, you can find a Vet, a wine shop, 3 kindergartens, Baker and Cook (a bakery-cafe) and Amano (an Italian restaurant.)
A stone’s throw away is Namly Park where you can find a kid’s playground. I found it decent-sized but maybe not big enough for the residents since, when I visited, people seemed to prefer to play badminton in the middle of the road (for cars) instead of in the park/playground (which was right besides the road!) If it gets overrun, there’s also Coronation Park a 15 minutes’ walk away.
Terrace houses are definitely the minority in this estate though. Walk down a bit more and it’s back to semi-Ds and bigger houses.
If the shops at Namly Place aren’t sufficient, there are more at the junction of Sixth Avenue and Bukit Timah Road. There’s Guthrie House (where you can find Cold Storage, Coffee Bean and Simply Bread), Bread Talk, Toast Box, a Standard Chartered outlet, a UOB outlet, an OCBC outlet, 6th Avenue Wanton Mee, some yuppie cafes, House of Traditional Javanese Massage and more.
Random streets of Namly Estate
We’ve previously looked mostly at Namly Place, where the terrace houses are but the estate consists of many other roads so I thought I’d share a couple of shots of those streets before I go.
Well, there’s not much to manicure in the photo above since it’s all pavement, but I didn’t see any signs of residents decorating the streets, as we saw in some of the other landed enclaves. My theory is that it’s because the roads here are busier (a lot of cars drive through the estate even if they don’t reside here) and because the houses are bigger, so the residents have more space within their properties to concentrate their gardening efforts on.
What do you think?
On the note of trees, there are restrictions regarding removing trees in 2 parts of Singapore (designated Tree Conservation Areas.) Within these areas, you can be fined for removing trees from within your own property!
I’m not sure whether Namly falls within this area as the NParks site isn’t very informative (when I zoom into their map the text gets blurry so I can’t quite see the streets within the area.) Clementi Road, Dunearn Road and Alexandra Road are mentioned as boundaries of a Tree Conservation Area so I’m guessing it would but you had better contact NParks to confirm/find out more.
I remember reading a blog post by a house owner who had SO much trouble with this rule (He had a tree that was affecting his power lines or sewage or something like that but he wasn’t allowed to remove it…) so always best to check! (Unfortunately I didn’t save the post so I can’t link to it.)
Now that we’ve toured Namly Estate, how did you find it? Personally, I think it would work best for families with kids (and large budgets!)
If there’s another area you would like us to visit, don’t forget to leave it in the comments! (We have quite a few to cover but I will eventually get round to yours!)
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5 Comments
How about kovan area and rosyth estate?
Would love for you to also write a review on Kembangan Estate. I don’t personally dwell there but I have friends who stay around and commented it is just next to frankel estate and the houses there are cheaper (with potential to be pulled up by the prices of Frankel due to its proximity) if one doesn’t have big budget for D15 homes. Is it really a good residential landed enclave to consider? Thanks
Look at Duchess Crest. It’s a condo and 6 mins ‘ walk to tkk mrt, even nearwr to hwa chong, walking distance to the coveted Nanyang primary and walking distance to cornation plaza, Kings and Crowns and all the conveyed schools, bus stips, mrt, amenities, parks etc
A good article next would be Braddell Heights and the landed enclave there. It’s seen as the smaller cousin of Serangoon Gardens, but there’s lots of history to the place, it’s near the Nex shopping mall, and in between 2 MRT stations (Serangoon and Lorong Chuan).