Gregor Gregersen looks down at the bar of gold in his hands. It is a slim trapezoid of burnished, ochre-hued metal, a 12.5kg brick that gleams gently in the light and is worth – at time of writing – about $1.2m (€1.1m). “Gold is intrinsically valuable; it doesn’t depend on the government,” says Gregersen, the founder of the Reserve, Singapore’s newest, largest and arguably most stylish vault for bullion and precious metals. “That’s the philosophy that underlies everything here.”

We are standing in a low-ceilinged bunker in the eastern end of Singapore. All around us, every centimetre of wall space is taken up by rows of drawers, each containing millions of dollars’ worth of bullion. Gregersen places the gold bar back in its drawer and turns the key, locking it safely away. The Reserve consists of a 17,000 sq m facility that was completed in 2024 and can store up to 500 tonnes (or about €45bn) of gold and 10,000 tonnes (about €10bn) of silver, potentially making it the world’s highest-capacity vault (national governments do keep some secrets to themselves).

“The financial system is much more fragile than it appears,” says Gregersen, who is originally from Germany but is now based in Singapore. “Geopolitics is getting more and more fragile. I wanted to create an option for myself and others to have a safe haven for assets.”

The Reserve is different from the other safe-storage sites peppered around the world, in places from Singapore to Switzerland. It doesn’t simply offer clients a place to stash their precious metals – it sells them too. 

“What’s different about us is that we are vertically integrated,” says Gregersen with a grin. “We are the trader, the equivalent of a bank, the vaulting operations and the facility itself. This means that we can control everything, from the time that a client buys the gold to how we source it and how it’s being stored. It also means that we can provide a lot more transparency.” 

In addition to this, The Reserve is more open to public attention – and access. In 2020, when Gregersen bought the building that became The Reserve, it housed an electronic components factory. He enlisted architects Wesley Liew and Jessica Baczkowski to transform the nondescript six-storey structure into an architectural marvel.

While the gold and the private vaults (used by the Reserve’s highest-paying clients to stash whatever they desire under guard, laser, lock and key) are located in small dedicated chambers, the silver vault is a cavernous 32-metre-high space of giant illuminated shelves. (Gregersen believes that silver is significantly undervalued – but perhaps you would expect him to.) A fifth-floor lounge and coffee bar, which Gregersen plans to let to corporations and luxury firms for parties and fashion shows, offers a vertiginous view of the vault from above. The cumulative aesthetic effect of this falls somewhere between Blade Runner and the Batcave. 

Gregersen is aware that The Reserve, in its total aversion to being nondescript and under-the-radar, is nothing like a “traditional” vault. But, he says, it checks all the boxes that matter. 

“Singapore is already a very safe place,” he says. “Having said that, we still have the heavy walls, we have mantraps – where a door closes behind you, sensor checks are happening. And if we don’t like you, we don’t open the other door and we call the police. We have auxiliary police, we have the lasers, we have motion sensors, vibration sensors, we have almost 500 CCTV cameras.” Gregersen pauses, then adds: “But you also need to have style.”
thereserve.sg