KING ALBERT PARK
The former two-storey blue building named Mcdonald’s Place was originally home to the fast-food company’s Singapore corporate headquarters until it was bought over for redevelopment by Oxley Sanctuary in 2012. Since the early ’90s when it first opened, the Mcdonald’s outlet with its own drive-through was a regular hangout for students from schools within the Bukit Timah vicinity, while its anchor tenant of Cold Storage was popular with the area’s residents. The building came to be known fondly as King Albert Park.
To one Singaporean family, the location holds so many memories that they bought three strata-titled commercial units and one residential unit when Oxley launched a sale for the new seven-storey freehold mixed development comprising 107 commercial units and 142 residential units that would receive TOP in November 2016. “Prior to me and my sister buying the units, we were told that Mcdonald’s and Cold Storage would return to the new site,” says Dr Julian Theng, an ophthalmologist, and the founder and group chairman of Eagle Eye Centre.
When the fact that neither was coming back sunk in, Dr Theng decided that he had to step up on efforts to bring life to what’s now known as KAP Mall. “When I bought the units, I was hoping that the building would bring joy to the community the way the old site had to many of us in the old days,” adds Dr Theng, who went on to found the Eaglewings Group. Through persistent concerted efforts, Dr Theng, his sister and some of the owners who make up the MCST of the building procured a good mix of tenants in the retail mall.
The Eaglewings Group, which also has a yacht charter arm, then filled in gaps in the services available at the mall by taking up empty units and turning them into Eaglewings Cinematics, a 24-hour minimart, sugar-free dessert cafe Camaca, and an optical shop called Owl Optics to complement Eagle Eye Centre’s services – just to name a few.