Touring Highgate Park estate: Rare freehold terrace houses in District 21 near Beauty World

D21 has been the talk of the town with the launch of Reserve Residences, which sold over 70per cent of its units during its launch. Moreover, given the previous request for tours around the Toh Tuck area, I decided it was time to do another D21 feature, namely Highgate Park, in this week's landed walkabout. 

Highgate Park is a small and fairly under-the-radar landed enclave situated in between Toh Tuck Forest and Signature Park condo. It consists of 2 streets (Highgate Walk and Highgate Crescent) which are coiled around a small playground, Highgate Walk Playground. It's small but pretty decent in size since it really only serves 2 streets.

As you can see, Google reviewers are unimpressed by the playground, mainly because of its small size. However, whilst the playground is nothing spectacular, I find the open space around it quite generous for a landed enclave of this size.

In case you're wondering why there's a Signature Park sign when the construction is for Forrett, there's a back gate to the Signature Park condo in between Highpark and Forrett.

This is for ease of access to the bus stop here, but there are only two buses that stop on this route: 41 and 77. The bright side is that Toh Tuck Road is not a very busy road, so you don't get a lot of road noise.

Across Toh Tuck Road is Bukit Timah Primary School, the closest Primary School to Highgate. There is also a small row of shophouses at Eng Kong, where you can find a pet store, vet and Baker and Cook (among other things.)  

For more shops, you can walk towards Jalan Jurong Kechil, which is about a 10 minutes walk away. There you'll find Bukit Timah CC, the Toh Yi HDB estate, where there are some coffee houses and shops. 

Cross Jalan Jurong Kechil and you find many more shophouses with eateries, massage places etc.

If you walk into Hoover Park estate behind these shophouses, there are many more commercial shops and eateries. (The area is something like a Little Korea, with many Korean shops and eateries.)

Walk that far and you'll pretty much have reached Beauty World MRT, which is about 16 minute's walk from the estate. (Beauty World is the closest MRT to Highgate. I've seen property ads claiming that the estate is near Bukit Batok MRT but since that's a 40+ minute walk away……)

Anyway, we've walked quite a good bit away now, so let's head back to the actual Highgate estate!

In comparison, the houses in Highgate look much better kept (see below.)
 

Crossed the road and zoomed out a bit so you can better see the pre-school. The hazardous sign is just past the pink gate on the left edge of the photo.

Mostly pastel-coloured. The houses were built in the 90s and they do have that "90s look."

See what I mean about parking being in short supply? And this was on a regular day! I wouldn't want to be a visitor here during the festive period. (You can't park on the other side despite the dotted white line, because of the double yellow line.)

Again, no place to park here. Since the closest residential properties on the same side of the road as Highgate are condos, visitors who can't find a space here would have to cross Toh Tuck Road and park at the residential area across (Toh Tuck Place etc.)

Before we go, let's have a look at the Master Plan of the area.

The two large reserve plots are interesting as they could represent potential upgrades to the area in the future. (No guarantee, of course! However, currently, there are a lot of residential properties in the area, so it's not absurd to think that these may be developed into infrastructure to support the area.)

One of the condos, Highgate, actually wraps around the landed estate, so it serves as a sort of narrow buffer between the wildlife/"forest" and the landed houses. (On the note of Highgate, it previously attempted to en bloc around 2018. Unsuccessfully, of course, but if it succeeds going forward, residents of this landed enclave will have a major construction project right next door.)

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This article was first published in Stackedhomes.