SINGAPORE - Aaron Teo has always been sporty, having played basketball and football since his school days.

"I represented the combined secondary schools basketball team and was chosen to be a national youth player," the 48-year-old architect recalls.

At age 17, he made it to Division 1, the top basketball league in Singapore.

"I think I may have been better at soccer," he says, adding that he was an S-League player "intermittently... between 1992 and 2001".

In 1997, he graduated with an architecture degree from the Queensland Technology Institute in Australia.

Today, besides being a partner in an architecture firm, he also runs a renovation and construction business, and is also a personal trainer.

But Mr Teo remains involved in basketball and has been coaching for almost 30 years, 15 of them at club level. From 2010 to 2016, he was the national youth basketball coach.

Now, he coaches basketball in schools and plays in the ActiveSG-Basketball Association of Singapore National Masters Basketball Tournament.

It is not surprising then that Mr Teo's taste in cars leans towards the sporty models. His first car in 1998 was a humble Ford Laser sedan, though.

Three years later, he bought a racy Subaru WRX STI and in 2007, he switched to a Mitsubishi EVO X. After only a year, he went back to a Subaru STI hatchback.

But he was still hooked on power and gravitated to a Nissan GT-R in 2014. In between, he had a number of other cars including a Honda Civic Type R, a high-performance variant of the Civic.

Mr Teo says his father was a major influence in his choices "because he loved cars".

"We watched F1 races together," he recalls. "He had a Mini Cooper and whenever I changed cars, he came along for the test drive - right up to when he died in 2019."

In 2015, Mr Teo decided he had enough of low-slung cars and bought a Porsche Cayenne sport utility vehicle. "I like how I sit up high and do not have to be concerned with kerbs and road humps," he quips.

He had two Cayennes, both used. The second one - a Cayenne Hybrid - "had many costly issues to rectify, so it was a painful experience", Mr Teo says.

While looking for another ride to replace it, he came across a Range Rover that was displayed at Ion Orchard in 2020. Mr Teo "loved it immediately".

"As an architect, I can really appreciate the car's design language," he adds.

But it was not until two years later that he finally got his hands on the car. In June this year, he bought a used seven-seater 2019 Range Rover Sport 3.0D SDV6 for $289,000.

"It is wonderfully comfortable and drives well because of the torque from its 3-litre turbodiesel engine," he says, referring to the car's 700Nm of shove.

He also likes that the Range Rover Sport is a capable four-wheel-drive off-roader which he can drive to construction sites.

"It is very respectable, unlike the sports cars I used to have," he adds.

What's in the boot?

- A basketball