If These Walls Could Talk

Sonia Ong is building a new hub for art, culture and hospitality. The founder of Singapore Wellness Association gives Crystal Lee an intimate tour of her Little India property.

- Sonia Ong

Every house has a story.

The story of 29 Rowell Road is one that its new owner Sonia Ong is piecing together as she spends more time within its old walls. I ask her about its history before seeing the place to find out more. “I cannot give you one,” she replies. “All we can do is speculate.”

“If you google 29 Rowell Road, you’ll find ‘Cheng Fong Signcraft’ at the address, so we know it had a life as a sign shop,” Ong later reveals when we meet at the Baroque House, which she named after its architectural style. Everything else about the two-storey shophouse, however, is shrouded in mystery.

“I stepped into the house, saw these beautiful tiles and thought, ‘Whose house was this? Was this a residence before it became a commercial entity?’ We’ve seen tiles like this in Emerald Hill, but these have more body and are gaudier. It appears that the owners who have had this house for 100 years did not do anything to it, and that’s understandable because rent was probably low in the early days. The people who took advantage of the low rental probably didn’t have the money to refurbish the place,” she conjectures.

Faded and distressed but still visibly ornate – thanks to intensive resurfacing work, these old Peranakan tiles that spread across the reception’s floor to the refurbished dining room (formerly a kitchen), imbued the house with an air of mystique and romance. Ong also took great pains to restore the shophouse’s original wooden double door, which had fallen offas one of the supporting beams was destroyed by termites.