The Mall Of The Future

Through connected retail spaces, Patrina Tan is not just narrowing the gap between the online and offline worlds –she’s also bringing people closer together.

- Audrey Phoon

We’re sitting at a long wooden dining table in a creamy hue that is perfect for #foodstagram flat lays. To our right, an army of shiny cooking appliances stands at attention in a sleek, marble-accented kitchen. It’s like a page out of Architectural Digest magically morphed to life, but the truth is far more intriguing: We’re in the middle of one of Patrina Tan’s memories that she has, quite remarkably, reconstructed

This is not some mind-altering hoodoo by the boho liberal arts graduate. A few years ago, Tan went on a caravan holiday in New Zealand. “What was most memorable about it was that in the mornings, we would bring all our barang barang, go to this central kitchen, and cook our breakfast together with other travellers,” she recalls. “Then we would have our meal, meet other people, talk to them about food and make new friends. It was the soul of the trip.” She decided it would be an interesting concept to re-create in Singapore, and Social Kitchen – a shared culinary space at Downtown Gallery – was born. But more about that later.

The communal cooking project isn’t the only novel note in Tan’s success story. There are many other surprises, and we should begin with the most unexpected of them all – that the retail whiz who has steered some of Singapore’s most well-known malls through boom times and bad, and became one of the industry’s youngest GMs at the age of 33, doesn’t actually do much shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. Now OUE’s senior vice-president of retail, marketing and leasing, she confesses: “Because of my busy schedule, I’m an online shopper. I even bought a car online once – the first time I saw it was when the sales guy delivered it to my office carpark!”