21 Carpenter

RICHARD HASSELL (RH): There are all kinds of authenticity and we explored a few different types. One type is technical heritage authenticity, which refers to the original form of the building and the evidence of how it’s been used over time. We were lucky that the old building had been covered with paint quite early on in its life, so the original Shanghai plaster was in pretty good condition underneath. We worked with Studio Lapis, our conservation consultant, to gently remove the paint and we discovered three different tones of Shanghai plaster. Even the windows are mostly original because the overhangs sheltered the timber frames from the rain.

The main corner of the building had stayed with the old family, but they’d rented out other parts of it, so there’d been various signs attached to it at different points. We were keen to leave these traces of past tenants. We left the holes in the facade where they’d hammered in wooden pegs to fix signs. We wanted to show the marks of age and not make the building look brand new again.

As an architect, I also like spatial authenticity. This is another type of authenticity we explored. I’m often disappointed in shophouse reuse projects where the interior space gets all chopped up and made into small rooms. You don’t get a sense of the tall and deep shophouse form. We decided that the rooms at 21 Carpenter would always follow the party wall locations, so the windows would fit nicely in each space. There’s a geometric and architectural authenticity to this.

When you do a shophouse extension with a larger block at the back, you also tend to lose the understanding of the shophouse courtyard. So, we designed the lobby as a kind of courtyard that’s glazed and internal. You can look up and see the back facade of the front block, the eaves, and light coming over the roof.

Finally, this building was an opportunity to explore a kind of authenticity of connection with people from the past. We wanted to create an emotional connection between the hotel guests and the original users of the building, the migrant workers who were sending money and letters back home. This idea of a connection across 90 years to other travellers to Singapore who were missing home led to the concept for the facade artwork.

We selected phrases from the remittance letters to create this emotional resonance. These weren’t the raw words of the workers themselves, as we found out that they engaged classically trained letter writers in Chinatown. I love the idea of the workers’ sentiments being framed through the words of the great classic poets of Chinese literature. Even now, you can feel the emotions carried across the decades.

RH: When I was looking at old pictures of Chinatown, I realised that Singapore, like Hong Kong in those days, had signage everywhere. Chinatown was a textual environment. The idea of text was interesting for 21 Carpenter because we wanted something for the new block that is obviously contemporary, but still has materiality, denseness, and texture that’s harmonious with the Shanghai plaster and mouldings of the old building.

The perforated facade came from the idea of wrapping the new block in text. We were also worried about it overwhelming the old building because it’s a lot taller. We wanted to make it seem weightless, very thin and folded like origami, so it appears to float. That would also allow the old building to have gravitas.

RH: It was a nice building to begin with, so that made it very easy. It had such interesting features, like the windows, which informed our idea to keep the room bays. They’re large, almost wall-sized windows, but they’re framed with wood, which is unusual. In the 1930s, there was a transition underway to steel-framed windows, but here they were still made of wood. They form a wall of glass composed of typical smaller windows. The buildings of the 1940s became quite different because a steel frame could make a whole window wall.

Every room has great light, air, and views, which is unusual for a shophouse project. Often you get, say, four great rooms facing the street, and then 20 awful rooms, some of which either have no windows, or simply overlook the air conditioners at the rear. I think our rooms are all good. We were driven by an urge to conserve more than we had to, and to celebrate the original experience of the building, rather than just treating it as a fancy facade stuck in front of an ordinary hotel.

RH: Solving the problems of the old rooms set the tone for the new rooms. Our idea was that whether you stayed in the old or new block, you had a consistent experience. We designed contemporary interpretations of 1930s Chinese furniture, referencing modern and art deco teak pieces. We reused all the wooden floors in the old building and kept them as we found them. They had nail holes and broken edges, which we filled with epoxy. We then gave the new block a recycled oak floor.

The windows in the new block are proportioned similarly to those in the old block. In all the bathrooms, we used frosted fluted glass, which has a 1930s feel. The corridor carpet and bedheads also feature abstracted calligraphy.

We recycled the timber joists found throughout the old building. They’re used for the door handle and window frames in the restaurant, the reception desk, the lobby floor, and the handrails at the ramps in the five-foot way. They’re such beautiful pieces of wood: 100-year-old Chengal in perfect condition.

RH: On paper, the building had a concrete frame, so as we designed it, we anticipated being able to knock down some internal walls. Then, once we were on site, the engineer said, “Hang on a minute. This is a very strange structure.” Even though they had investigated a typical column and a beam and they looked in decent condition individually, it turned out that the concrete structure as a whole was not rigidly tied together as you would expect in a modern concrete building.

Again, this was because of that transition in technology from brick and timber to concrete. The 1930s engineers were obviously not so comfortable with concrete, so they designed it like wood.

We had to stiffen the structure by wrapping the old concrete skeleton in steel. Every beam was cradled and picked up on a steel beam, which connected a new steel column that extended all the way down to new piles and foundations. These had to straddle the old piles without adding more load. Our columns tripled in size and we lost a bit of headroom. We then carefully set the steel structure into the thickness of the perimeter brick wall so that the external facade retained its original thickness.

These were all technical challenges, but they were quite significant, because in a hotel you’re always working at the scale of small objects and finding ways to tuck things in wherever possible.

RH: The old building was designed for cross-ventilation and ceiling fans, not air conditioning. Nowadays, tourists who come to Singapore say, “It’s so cold inside the buildings. I got sick on the second day from going back and forth between the hot, humid air and the cold interiors.” We wanted to try out a hybrid cooling solution that we had previously developed with Transsolar, a climate consultant working in the area of thermal comfort, for the BRAC University project in Bangladesh.

We explained to our client that if they set the air conditioning to 26 ºC and used a fan, the fan would make it feel like 24 ºC. It would save energy and reduce how sick people feel because there’s less temperature variation. The client agreed to do it. We’re now using the same technique in another hotel we’re designing. I think opinions around air conditioning have changed, which is a great advancement.

RH: We’ve done a couple of projects with greenery on North Canal Road, as well as PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering and our rooftop at the WOHA studio on Hongkong Street. There are quite a few shophouses and other buildings around us that have added greenery. It’s quite interesting that even Chinatown, which has a hundred percent site coverage, is becoming green. Biodiversity increases significantly just having these small pockets of plants in the area.

Sunbirds visit our rooftop garden at WOHA and make nests. We see a variety of birds flying from rooftop to rooftop. To them, it’s just their neighbourhood. They have a daily routine: Check out the flowers on our rooftop at 10am, and have a little bath at 21 Carpenter when the sprinklers go off in the morning. It’s very nice when wild creatures move in based on what you’ve done.

RH: The developer, 8M Real Estate, really wanted the restaurant to be a place where everyone in the neighbourhood can work, bring their clients, and get to meet each other. There was a great vision of it being the neighbourhood bistro or coffee shop, and it’s really worked. It has started a community.

From a design point of view, we thought it was important to expose this activity to the street so people know it’s there. We brought the open kitchen out to the first shophouse bay, so you can see the chef preparing things with care and skill. We put the bar in a pivotal position at the corner. We also made lanterns and lamps that we placed around the restaurant to draw people in. All these things are design aspects of a central idea that this is a place with low barriers to entry. It’s a place for the neighbourhood to come together.

RH: No, I don’t think there is. It is one way of making people really connect to a building. A lot of people feel that architecture is big business. It seems very technical and mysterious to people outside the profession. But because it’s a capsule of human life, I think it’s filled with emotion. It endures, so it immediately becomes about the past, past emotions, and stories of where people come from.

Even when we talk about sustainability, I think about it in terms of environmental grief. If the building appears to be, in some small way, reversing a trend of loss and destruction, that makes people feel quite emotional about it as well.

RH: It comes back to the question of authenticity. 21 Carpenter is about a kind of heritage experience where it doesn’t feel like you’re playing make-believe, pretending you’re back in the past. It’s not a stuffy heritage experience because it never was that kind of place. It was a place of business, a node in a financial network across the world. Our take on it was that it should feel like it’s a useful space for the modern-day traveller.

When you stand on the roof terrace and look out to the Singapore River, you can see the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) and United Overseas Bank (UOB) towers. This remittance house, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, ended up being part of OCBC. So, this little building is part of the story of how Singapore became a financial hub. From small beginnings, big things can grow.

The building’s narrative of connecting you to migrant workers makes you think, “Here I am in 2025, another person trying to build my life through travelling and business, and I’m just part of a long story of people making their way in the world through this unique little corner of Asia.”