Design and Features

Design and features

Shophouses may nominally stretch as high as three floors in densely populated locations. Depicted here is a row of mid 20th century, three storey shophouses in Chinatown, Singapore of traditional, Art Deco and International styles.

Multi-functional

Typically, shophouses consist of shops on the ground floor which open up to a public arcade or "five-foot way", and which have residential accommodation upstairs. Shophouses, like terraced houses in England and townhouses in the U.S., abut each other to form rows with regular facade, with fire walls between them and adherence to street alignment.

As its name suggests, a shophouse often contains a shop with separate residential spaces. More generally, space occupied by the former contains a semi-public function. While this usually is, and historically usually was, a shop, it could just as easily be a food and beverage outlet (e.g. coffeeshop or bar), a service provider (e.g. clinic or barber), an industrial activity (e.g. cottage industry or auto workshop) or a community space (e.g. a school or clan association). Residential spaces are meant to accommodate one or more families, or serve as a dormitory for single workers.

Popular belief holds that shophouses were initially occupied by single families, with their private living areas in one space and the more public family business in another. However, it is possible that the two spaces were always usually used by unrelated persons or groups, who may be tenants or resident owners. The position of the shop and residential space depends on the number of floors of the shophouse: A single storey shophouse tends to include residential space behind the shop, while residential spaces in shophouses of two or more storeys are typically located above the shop.


Heights

A terraced layout allows a row of shophouses to extend as long as a city block permits, as exemplified by this long row of double storey shophouses in George Town, Penang.

Due to constraints in building technology, early shophouses in the 19th and early 20th centuries were generally low rise buildings with numbers of floors averaging between one to three, with two storey variations being the most abundant. Three storey shophouses are most common in central cores of towns and cities with higher levels of prosperity and population density, and pre-war shophouses with up to four storeys existed later in the first half of the 20th century with the advent of modern construction materials like reinforced concrete.

Narrow fronts, deep rears

Shophouses have narrow street frontages, but may extend backwards to great depths, in some cases extending all the way to the rear street. A number of reasons have been given for the narrow widths of these buildings.

One reason relates to taxes, i.e. the idea that buildings were historically taxed according to street frontage rather than total area, thereby creating an economic motivation to build narrow and deeply. Another reason is building technology: the timber beams that carried the roof and floor loads of these structures were supported by masonry party walls.

The extent of frontage was therefore affected by the structural span of the timber used. While all shophouses appear, visually, to have similarly narrow widths, these are not uniform and minor variations are the rule, especially when comparing buildings built at different times, by different owners and with different materials or technologies.

In Singapore, many Chinese immigrants moved with their businesses into shophouses, and as the majority of these immigrants came from the southeastern coastal provinces of China, the architecture of early Niucheshui shophouses was strongly influenced by that of southern China.

Terraced building

Shophouses are urban terraced buildings, i.e. standing right next to each other along a street, with no gap or space in between buildings (in similar vein as a terraced house). Frequently, a single wall separates the shophouses on either side of it.

"Five-foot ways"

An example of a five-foot way along a row of shophouses in Selangor, Malaysia.
Main article: Five foot way

The covered walkway along the road is within the shophouse property line but is for public use, providing pedestrians shade from sun and rain. This practice can be traced to antecedents in South China, but also to the Royal Ordinances by Phillip II of 1573. In early Manila two-storey houses were built in rows with arcades on the ground floor.

 A key development was the Raffles Ordinances (1822) for Singapore which stipulated that “all houses constructed of brick or tiles have a common type of front each having an arcade of a certain depth, open to all sides as a continuous and open passage on each side of the street”.

This practice spread to other States in British Malaya and by-laws with requirements for “verandah-ways of...at least seven feet measuring from the boundary of the road .....and the footway within any verandah-way must be at least five feet in the clear.”

The by-laws were an important element in the evolution of the shophouse building form. They were not easy to implement: builders naturally wanted to build on and use as much of their land as possible. Even to this day municipal authorities have to occasionally make sure that the arcades are kept free from shopkeepers blocking the path with their goods.

In other parts of Southeast Asia, shophouses lack this distinction but, if an area's by-laws are observed, are a useful feature that protects pedestrians from the sun and frequent torrential rain. Older shophouses in Bangkok, for example, may have a plain ledge without gutters jutting out over the pavement, while newer ones may do without this element altogether.
Internal courtyards

Internal courtyards provide open ventilated voids to allow circulation; such as the presence of natural light and air.

One of the most important features of the shophouse is the use of a variety of open-to-sky spaces to admit natural daylight as well as natural air. These open-to-sky spaces may be back yards, small airwells and most commonly, internal courtyards. Depending on their size, these courtyards may be landscaped spaces for quiet reflection, places to dry laundry, vents for cooking fumes or toilet odours or spaces for any number of household activities.

Party walls

The party walls that separate most shophouses from their neighbours are generally constructed out of masonry (usually locally manufactured baked clay bricks) and they are structural, load-bearing walls, i.e. they transfer the weight of the roof and upper floors down to the ground. Party walls marked a major shift from traditional timber post-and-beam frame construction of pre-colonial Southeast

Asia. Masonry was used to bear the heavy loads, to provide privacy and security and, importantly, to serve as a barrier to the spread of fire in a crowded urban settlement. Modern shophouses use similar materials but additionally include reinforced concrete beams.

Roofs

Shophouses are typically built with pitched roofs covered with orange clay roof tiles. Again, this marks an important shift away from the use of more organic coconut frond thatch (called "attap") in traditional architecture. The added cost of clay tiles was borne due to their greater durability and especially their resistance to fire.

Floors and beams

A row of double storied late 19th century shophouses in Geylang, Singapore are seen with facades in varied shades of colours.

Traditionally shophouses were built with structural (i.e. load bearing) timber beams which carried the weight of the roof and floors. Floor were similarly made of timber planks, often with narrow gaps in between them to allow air to filter through and to help the building (and its inhabitants) to 'breathe' better. The use of timber beams and floor boards was very much in line with local building traditions. Modern shophouses, on the other hand, use reinforced concrete beams and slabs.

Facade colours

Tourists often enjoy visiting and walking around shophouse districts because of the variety of colours used in their facade decoration. Traditionally, many shophouses would have been plastered an off-white colour. Other popular early colours were indigo and ochre, given the range of available pigments.

By the mid-20th century, pastel colours (rose pink, baby blue, light yellow, etc.) became popular, and they remain the colours that most people most strongly associate with these buildings. However, many contemporary or restored shophouses have now taken to using very bold colours, including deep reds, black, silver, gold, purple, etc.

Facade ornamentation

Traditional shophouses facade ornamentation draws inspiration from the Malay, Chinese and European traditions. European neo-classical motifs include egg-and-dart moldings and ionic or Corinthian capitals on decorative pillasters.

From the Malay building tradition, elaborate woodwork has been borrowed in the form of carved panels. Fascia boards, louvres, screens and fretwork. Finally, from the Chinese tradition comes mythological motifs like phoenixes. Other traditions include the use of Peranakan pastel coloured glazed tiles, often with floral or geometric motifs.

The degree of a shophouse's ornamentation depends on the prosperity of its owner and the surrounding area; shophouse facades in cities and (former) boomtowns are generally more elaborate than rural shophouses, which tend to be more spartan in design.

In comparison to traditional shophouses, modern variations through the 1950s up until the 1980s were devoid of ornamental decorations and are more often designed for utilitarian purposes. Beginning the 1990s, the buildings began to adopt postmodern and revival styles.