Street appeal
Singapore’s colourful shophouses
I’m wondering if I’m making a mistake as I leave my plush modern Singapore hotel to stay in Chinatown. My taxi driver is puzzled. Every so often he repeats the address and laughs. Possibly he’s old enough to remember when Chinatown had a dodgy reputation and wasn’t the cool happening place it is today.
As we drive past the Singapore City Gallery, he urges me to visit the model replica of the city inside. “I can even see my own house there,” he says.
Despite its reputation as a city of futuristic skyscrapers, Singapore has a rich street heritage. Luckily, several decades ago, it set about saving its colourful shophouses – the narrow two and three-storey buildings in a mix of Chinese, Malay and European styles where traditionally families ran a business at the bottom and lived overhead.
A row of those shophouses has been turned into an intriguing new Chinatown hotel, the darkly coloured Six Senses Duxton. As I walk through the door, I feel I’m entering another world.
It’s a dramatic yellow, gold and black place, a reimagined luxurious opium-den-inspired interior, designed by well-regarded British designer and former Bond girl Anouska Hempel.
There’s also a free consultation with a Chinese physician in a room lined with herbal concoctions.
After completing the check-in formalities, I’m encouraged to step into a large singing bowl – like an inverted bell – which is then struck. The vibrations flow through my body and are surprisingly relaxing. There’s also a free consultation with a Chinese physician in a room lined with herbal concoctions.
My room is one of the smaller ones but it’s cleverly designed – again in distinctive colours and with great attention to detail such as the copies of indenture or land contracts used as wallpaper.
Ceilings are low, corridors are winding and the rooms have many different layouts due to heritage requirements. Guests are welcome to lounge around the public areas and leaf through the collection of coffee-table books.
The Yellow Pot restaurant offers contemporary Chinese food using local and regional ingredients and its terrace makes good use of the sheltered outdoor space in front, often called the ‘ five-foot way’ (the minimum width of shophouses).
The Duxton has some nice connections to its neighbourhood such as the tea appreciation classes run by a nearby tea merchant – Yixing Xuan Teahouse – and the advisory Chinese medicine doctor is from Long Zhong Tang Clinic across the road.
About a five-minute walk away, the Six Senses sister hotel, the Maxwell, opened in December in a grander, colonial 19th-century former shop/office building.