Su Anne Mi is rethinking how Singapore balances heritage, creativity, and community against the demands of utility

For our SG60 September edition, we turn our attention to “Built Spaces” — the streets, structures, and shared places that hold the weight of our collective memory while adapting to the demands of a changing city. In this series, we explore the tensions, triumphs, and quiet evolutions that shape the spaces we call our own — and ask what it will take for them to remain meaningful in the decades to come.

Su Anne Mi occupies an unusual vantage point in Singapore’s built environment. As founder & CEO of The Great Room and managing director, Asia Pacific at Industrious, she works where hospitality meets design, and where adaptive reuse contends with commercial necessity. 

Her career is an exercise in inhabiting heritage without embalming it — reimagining history while keeping its contradictions intact. That balance, she says, is best understood through places that carry their past lightly.

Raffles Hotel, Su Anne admits without hesitation, is one of them. “Not many buildings in Singapore date back to the 1880s and still hold such glamour while remaining relevant.” Walking through the Walk of Fame corridor, you follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Taylor, Joseph Conrad, and Kofi Annan.

In the lobby, a music box from the 1890s — an antique jukebox of sorts — still plays music from giant metal discs the size of a hula hoop. 

“It still works,” she recalls. “I once heard the harpist play the Harry Potter theme song in the lobby — a surreal moment of classical elegance meets pop culture.” In moments like that, history doesn’t stand still. It meets you halfway.

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Her own workspace lives in this same meeting point. The Great Room at Raffles Arcade shares its address with the Long Bar, where tourists queue for Singapore Slings. “It’s probably the only coworking space in a luxury heritage hotel in Singapore,” she says, the novelty serving as both statement and strategy — tourist meets business, nostalgia meets now.

But her sense of place extends far beyond polished interiors. “While I spend most of my time in refined interiors, I have a soft spot for wide, open exteriors,” Su Anne says. Golf courses where her family plays. The stretch of East Coast Park where she wings foils.

These are part of her personal geography, which is why the closure of golf courses and the reshaping of the East Coast’s coastline under the Long Island reclamation cut deeper than urban planning. “We’re watching familiar spaces disappear,” she observes. 

That irony — the gap between what a city celebrates and what it sustains — is a familiar one. “Rent needs to justify preservation, and heritage doesn’t always deliver ROI,” Su Anne reflects. The Great Room’s transformation of the Eu Yan Sang medicinal shophouse on South Bridge Road was an intentional departure from that calculus. 

Partnering with landlord 8M and designer Kulor, she says, was “about extending — not overwriting — the story”. Today, the rooftop once used to dry medicinal herbs is a bar and “the best-kept secret in Chinatown”. Its history doesn’t shout; it lingers, present in photographs, ornaments, and the air itself. 

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The problem, in her view, isn’t that Singapore ignores its heritage — it’s that the city has been built around a singular metric. “Right now, we’ve built a city around GDP. That pushes out the soulful, the experimental, the slow,” Su Anne offers.

“Yet the places and people we remember most aren’t always efficient — they’re just deeply human.” Her vision is for a city that values artists, musicians, creators, and athletes not as pleasant extras, but as part of its essential economy.

Signs of that shift, she believes, are already emerging. “It’s no longer a question about form vs function, but the interplay between them — how built spaces don’t just hold, but actively shape the culture and communities they contain.” At The Great Room, this belief has guided nearly a decade of design.

“Post-Covid-19, people don’t come to workspaces because they have to — they come because they choose to. That raises the bar. People stay for friendships, high-value interactions, serendipitous magic.”

Her company’s growth reflects that shift in expectation. “Co-working started like motels. Then came The Great Room, which elevated it to a level akin to a hotel. Now, it’s like resorts — we’re designing entire buildings, ecosystems, and experiences with care and intention.” In her telling, it’s an architectural equivalent of slow food — spaces designed to be inhabited, not consumed.

When Su Anne talks about the next generation, there’s both urgency and faith. “Singapore has always punched above its weight by dreaming big and staying curious. I hope the next generation continues that legacy; to lead not just in efficiency, but in imagination. My wish is that we keep asking: Who came before? What stories live in this room? How do we keep that spirit alive?”

The questions don’t seek resolution; they insist on being carried forward, reframed each time they are asked. In the end, a city is not defined by its skyline but by the rooms, corridors, and open spaces that change us in ways we can’t quite measure.