It was a pleasure to be back in Singapore at the end of September for our latest graduation of students from our partnership with SIM (Singapore Institute of Management). I am no great fan of monolithic corporate hotels, so arranged to stay in a more historic, smaller place in Chinatown. It is an area I know well and have watched be preserved rather than razed and redeveloped which has been a common Singaporean feature. 

The hotel I stayed in was originally a series of shophouses built in 1927 and it was converted in the late 2010s into a hotel. The façade remains, but the shophouse structure is only visible internally in the foyer (picture below) and the five-foot walkway outside. 

Given BA’s postponement of my return flight by 16 hours, I gained some time in Singapore and explored the outside of some of the shophouses around the hotel. This revealed quite a set of tiling – much looked to be original tiles but repointed/repositioned. The photos below are from Ann Siang Hill/Road around my hotel. This tiling is one of the external distinctive features of these shophouses. 

I combined that with a trip just off Orchard Road to Emerald Hill, where the photos below were taken. The detail and design are interesting, and one wonders what the insides of these buildings look like? This is an area I had been meaning to visit before and the contrast to the adjacent Orchard Road is so stark. 

The answer to what the insides of these houses look like is partly available. A few years ago, I had purchased a fascinating book on the design of Singaporean shophouses. On returning to Scotland had a look for the houses I had seen. That book contains interior photos of some of the Emerald Hill houses. It dates them to 1902-1920 and the book notes Emerald Hill was one of the first areas to be conserved from 1981. My hotel was also in there as were other places in the area in which I stayed. 

The book contains a short section on glazed ceramic tiles, and I repeat it here: 

“Decorative ceramic tiles – the sort of tiles that were used in latter half of the Victorian era as a surround for the fireplace and hearth in thousands of suburban houses across the British Isles – were popular from the late 19^th century through to the early years of the 20^th century when we find a lot of tiles with Art Nouveau motifs. Initially these decorative wall tiles were employed for interiors – typically they were applied to the wall space between the floor and a waist-height dado rail – but around the time of World War I they began to be used for external surfaces, as decorative panels beneath windows, both at street level and on the floors above. Unlike the pavement tiles used for floors and the five-foot way verandahs, these decorative wall tiles were glazed and often in relief. And whereas floor tiles almost always featured geometric designs, wall tiles tended to feature floral motifs which no doubt appealed to traditional Chinese aesthetic sensibilities.” 

There are undoubtedly many more delightful shophouses and tiles I have not seen in Singapore – the book is full of them. The number surviving is a pleasant surprise. In a city-state which is constantly renewing and building (to good effect), there are still some spots that reflect the design, heritage, and style of Singapore of a hundred years ago. The tiles and shophouses are reminders of that past providing a distinctive streetscape and environment. 

Reference

Singapore Shophouse, text by Julian Davidson, photography by Luca Invernizzi Tettoni, 2010, Talisman Publishing Pte Ltd, Singapore. ISBN 978-981-05-9716-0.