F a Gleaming Network of Expressways, with a Taste for Horticulture
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Colorful shop-houses line the streets of Singapore’s Joo Chiat neighborhood. Nowhere is Singapore’s and I moved to Singapore last year door that had a starring role in Crazy FA CE multilayered past WHEN MY WIFE for her new job, I expected to be Rich Asians, is dominated by a cluster more visible than in traveling into the future. On my previous visits, Singapore’s of towering metal trees that look the façades of its shop- famously efficient airport, Changi, had seemed like the like they were designed by a robot houses. Today, as principal node of a gleaming network of expressways, with a taste for horticulture. SIMON WILLIS reports, subway lines, and skyscrapers, all designed to maximize So when I arrived I was surprised these long-neglected the flow of people and capital. It is a place where your to find myself immersed in history. architectural jewels car automatically pays for parking, where the traffic lights We moved into an apartment in are being celebrated are controlled by artificial intelligence, and where the Joo Chiat, a neighborhood on the and restored to their cityscape is gilded with ever more fantastical architectural city-state’s eastern coast that former splendor. forms. Marina Bay Sands, a triple-towered hotel and was developed in the 1920s. Our PHOTOGRAPHS BY casino, is capped by a horizontal sky garden resembling apartment is in a shop-house, a style DARREN SOH a marooned spaceship. Gardens by the Bay, the park next of building imported by Chinese TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 119 settlers in the early 19th century that formed the warp of modernity between the 1970s and 90s. It is also and weft of the city’s architectural fabric for more than true that much of the urban sprawl has the flavorless a hundred years. The template was simple. Shop-houses internationalism of an airport terminal. But in the were built two or three stories high, and were designed past decade Singapore has entered a more preservationist to contain businesses on the ground floor and living spaces phase, with shop-houses being restored and renovated upstairs. Out front were covered verandas called “five foot all over town—and snapped up at eye-watering prices. ways,” open-ended to create shaded colonnades. Inside, Simon Monteiro, a local realtor who specializes in old light wells with a clear view of the sky formed miniature buildings, likens this boom to an art-market bubble: courtyards brightened by the sun and cooled by the rain. “People are buying them like Picassos.” If Singapore once Ours was built between the two world wars and, with seemed like a city intent on replacing the past with the its simple white façade, has an elegant austerity. The same future, it is now taking a backward glance. cannot be said for others around the corner. On my way to get my morning coffee I walk down Joo Chiat Road, ne recent morning I went to meet Jimmy Seah, the district’s main thoroughfare, which is lined with shop- O a vivacious man in his mid fifties who owns a shop- houses decorated with Corinthian pilasters, stucco leaves, house on Spottiswoode Park Road, just north of and grids of colored tiles depicting pomegranates, peaches, Chinatown. The street is part of Blair Plain, a district pineapples, peacocks, and hummingbirds. On weekends developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by local we often get breakfast at Mr. and Mrs. Mohgan’s, a stall that merchants, or towkays. To show off the sophistication sells Singapore’s finestroti prata, a fried Indian flatbread. of their tastes and to outdo their European counterparts, Diagonally opposite the stall, a one-block stretch of Koon these merchants constructed some of the grandest shop- Seng Road has grand old shop-houses painted in Instagram- houses in Singapore. They incorporated all manner friendly shades of pink, pistachio, emerald, and primrose. of international flourishes; several even have loggias on Beneath the upstairs windows, herons flap their wings their top floors, the kind you see in a Venetian palazzo. and tigers hunt their prey, forever frozen in plaster relief. Seah bought his house in 2009, and at first glance it Shop-houses are records of Singapore’s multicultural struck him as unprepossessing. Low and plain, it had broken history. After its founding in 1819 by British politician shutters, a moldering white façade, and a collapsed roof. and empire builder Stamford Raffles, the city grew into a But then he began to chip away at the plaster covering powerful entrepôt, attracting merchants and traders from the front of the building and started to see layers of color underneath—first blue, then flecks of red and green. Slowly, over the course of two months of careful chiseling, these traces coalesced into an image of birds perched on branches and, above them, faded reddish-brown shapes all over the world. They brought their that Seah thinks originally depicted a cloud of bats in flight. architectural tastes with them, and left The fresco dated from the 1860s. This makes it not their mark on the shop-houses they only the oldest painted shop-house façade in Singapore inhabited. The dwellings in Joo Chiat but the sole survivor of a time when, according to one were built by Peranakans, people of French visitor who came to Singapore in 1831, all the mixed Chinese and Malay descent shop-houses were “covered with brightly colored frescoes.” who settled in Singapore and whose The dull-looking building Seah had bought suddenly culture was a rich blend of Chinese, became a unique piece of architectural history and Malaysian, Indonesian, and European a window onto Singapore’s beginnings. influences. Elsewhere in the city you In the 1960s, when Seah was growing up in a shop- can see shop-houses with Islamic house, Singapore had only just gained independence from latticework, rococo curlicues, Dutch Malaysia and was a poor island in a state of disrepair. gables, and French shutters. To keep housing affordable, the government instituted The richness of these buildings did strict rent controls, the downside of which was that not comport with my preconceptions, landlords had neither the money nor the incentive to keep which I quickly realized were out their properties in good order. Seah’s family was crammed of date. It is true that more than into a warren of tiny rooms. The roof leaked constantly, 50 percent of Singapore’s old city and he sometimes repaired the damage by fashioning was demolished by the march makeshift guttering out of shuttlecock canisters. “My sisters Clockwise from top: Shop-houses along Singapore’s Petain Road; an aerial view of Chinatown; a “five foot way” veranda on Petain Road. TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM 121 Jimmy Seah’s residence, center, on Spottiswoode Park Road, has Singapore’s oldest frescoed shop-house façade. and I used to complain,” he said. “Why do we have to a developer who owns four other live in this crappy old house?” shop-house hotels in the city, live together. “It’s like shop-houses So they were only too pleased when, in the 1970s and with another planned for 2021. used to be,” he told me, “with multiple 80s, the government began to knock them down to make Manchharam spent his childhood families living in the same building.” way for new condo towers and public-housing blocks. in a shop-house in Kampong Glam, I met him at 28 Blair Road, once “Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, had where his grandfather, originally his childhood home and now his a great vision,” Seah said. “You have to give people a roof from the Indian state of Gujarat, had company’s latest project. Above an over their heads before you can think of other things.” set up a successful textile firm. ornate pair of traditional, saloon-type But some felt that the focus on growth and efficiency By the late 2000s Manchharam, now shop-house doors, or pintu pagar, is a stripped away soul, and Singapore developed a reputation in the property business, had already panel bearing the Chinese characters for corporate blandness. Visiting in the 1990s, the sci-fi converted shop-houses into ateliers for “Low Family Residence.” That novelist William Gibson wrote that “the physical past, for several young fashion designers is where the old world ends. Inside, here, has almost entirely vanished.” The contemporary in need of studio space. But tourism the house is completely white: white confection that had grown in its place felt to him was growing dramatically—between walls and floor, white furniture, like Disneyland. A few historically minded officials at 2005 and 2018 the number of visitors white-painted porcelain on a white Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), to Singapore doubled—and he saw a shelf, white ceiling lamps made by the government body responsible for city planning, began market among people who wanted a local artist from upcycled plastic to worry that the destruction was going too far—that a taste of the old world instead of the wrap. But as you explore the house, Singapore was in danger of demolishing its identity. city’s glitzy novelties. you see small areas of wall where So they began slowly to acquire shop-houses all over the KeSa House, like Manchharam’s the bare brick shows through, or city to protect them from developers, and then to sell other hotels, is an exercise in dramatic tiny circles on a porcelain pot where them to owners interested in preservation. reinvention. The exterior has been the original decoration has been left Around the corner from Seah’s place is one of the most faithfully maintained, the pilasters unpainted—fleeting glimpses of the spectacular beneficiaries of this preservationist trend.