Patrick Comerford
During our short visit to Singapore last month, we spent much of an afternoon in Emerald Hill with its colourful and carefully-restored low-rise heritage houses, a quiet corner tucked away behind the busy shopping malls and traffic of Orchard Road.
Emerald Hill has a rich collection of Peranakan houses and shopfronts and its Perankan and Sino-Baroque architecture make it a unique part of Singapore’s architectural heritage.
This is a conservation area and the residents have become used to curious tourists coming to see and photograph their homes. For half a century or more it was home to many members of the wealthy Peranakan community. Small metal signs along the way offer bite-sized facts about many of the houses. The house numbers on Emerald Hill are even on one side and odd on the other.
But, almost two centuries ago, Emerald Hill was a nutmeg and fruit orchard, established in 1837 by Singapore’s acting Postmaster General, William Cuppage, who came from an Irish family that once lived in Coolock in north Dublin.
Before the days of Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar, Emerald Hill was covered in primary rainforest. By the early 1800s, many Chinese immigrants settled on the land, growing gambier and pepper to make a living but exhausting the land. By the time William Cuppage (1807-1871) came to own the land legally, it had already become a barren field.
Cuppage first leased Emerald Hill in 1837 and in 1845 he secured a permanent grant for his nutmeg plantation, but this failed in the 1860s because of disease.
Cuppage moved from his home on Hill Street to Emerald Hill in the early 1850s and built two houses, Erin Lodge and Fern Cottage. After he died in 1872, his plantation was left to his daughters and in 1890 it was sold to one of his sons-in-law, the lawyer Edwin Koek. Koek turned the area into an orchard and built another house that he named Claregrove. But his orchard failed, he went bankrupt, and the property was sold to Thomas E Rowell in 1891.
The land, totalling 13.2 ha, and its three houses – Erin Lodge, Fern Cottage and Claregrove – were bought in 1900 by two businessmen, Seah Boon Kang and Seah Boon Kiat. The three houses once owned by the Cuppage family were later demolished: Fern Cottage made way in 1906 for terrace houses; Claregrove gave way in 1924 to the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School; and Erin Lodge was replaced with more terrace houses.
Seah Eng and Seah Boon Kang sold small pieces of the land to new owners who went on to build the terrace houses and shophouses on Emerald Hill. They subdivided the property in 1901 into 38 plots, 10 of which they kept while the remaining 28 lots were sold to various people.
Three lots were bought by an influential Peranakan doctor and social reformer, Dr Lim Boon Keng (1869-1957). He was one of the earlier residents of Emerald Hill, and lived at No 2 Emerald Hill, then known as Claregrove. His was the most prominent among the Straits Chinese families that lived on the hill.
The builders of the houses at Emerald Hill Road were mostly Peranakans or Straits-born Chinese in general. The first house in the area was built in 1902. By 1918, one-third of the houses had been built.
Majolica tiles, abundant foliage and mood-boosting paint jobs are clear design features along Emerald Hill. The houses further along the street reflect the influence of traditional European architecture, including cast iron-balustrade and classical pilasters, alongside architectural features steeped in Chinese symbolism, creating an eclectic yet elegant vintage aesthetic. There are houses with Peranakan tiles, carved timber window screens and half-length timber doors known as pintu pagar.
Many architects contributed to this eclectic combination of Chinese and European architectural elements. The terraces from 8 to 16 Emerald Hill Road were built in 1911 for the developer Phua Poh Kim by Tan Seng Chong, the first Chinese person in Singapore to start his own architectural practice. The houses at 64 to 74 were designed in 1916 by Johannes Bartholomew (Birch) Westerhout for Puey Soo Keng. Westerhout was also the Municipal Commissioner (1929-1934) and a magistrate.
On the other side of the street, a row of houses show whitewashed façades and traditional Teochew gateways with emerald green, porcelain roof ornamentations. The houses at 39 and 43 were built for Goh Kee Hoon and were designed in 1905 by Wan Mohamad Kassim, the leading architect at GA Fernandez and Company.
No 41 Emerald Hill was restored in 1990-1991, and boasts fine craftsmanship in its wood, metal and plasterwork. The intricately carved antique pintu pagar pr half-length door at the entrance was salvaged from another house in Smith Street in Chinatown.
No 45 is a terraced house designed in 1903 for the Seah brothers by Wee Teck Moh, an architect best known for his classic Sino-Baroque shophouses. The house has the widest frontage on Emerald Hill and a swallow tail roof ridge, giving it the appearance of a Chinese temple. The broad site makes it possible for the internal courtyard to be centrally located instead of at the side, as with most terraced houses.
The house has a distinctive traditional Teochew-style gateway, with an upturned swallow tail roof ridge decorated with cut porcelain pieces known as jian nian. When house was restored in 1990s, it kept most of its original fabric, and much of what had been lost over the years was recovered, returning the house to its original glory.
RT Rajoo (Rethinam Thamby Rajoo Pillay), an architect and contractor who died in 1929, designed 17 properties from 53 to 85 in the mid-1920s for Low Koon Yee, a prominent Teochew business figure.
From No 134 on, the heritage houses end and modern apartment blocks begin.
The original Singapore Chinese Girls School (SCGS) stood for almost 70 years at 37 Emerald Hill Street. The school was founded in 1899 by Dr Lim Boon Keng, Sir Song Ong Siang and Khoo Seok Wan for Peranakan girls.
During the Japanese occupation, the building of new houses stopped. After World War II, houses continued to be built on Emerald Hill Road until the 1950s. But most of the Peranakan family started moving out of Emerald Hill in the 1950s, while other plots of lands were developed as blocks of flats.
Many of the streets and roads off Emerald Hill Road also retain interesting examples of Peranakan and ‘Sino-Baroque’ architecture, including Hullet Road, built in 1914 and named after RW Hullet, a former principal of Raffles Institution; Saunders Road, named in 1927 after a British colonial judge, Charles James Saunders; and Peranakan Place, with a row of six two-storey shophouses first built in 1902.
The first few residential houses along the row have been transformed in recent years into bars and restaurants. The Alley Bar at 2 Emerald Hill Road is in one of the oldest traditional terrace houses.
The Ong family transformed an abandoned alley between two shophouses into the Alleybar and it opened in 1999.
We stopped for a while in Que Pasa at 7 Emerald Hill Road, which offers over 100 wines from all over the world. As we waited for the rain to ease off, I had a glass of wine from with what they describe as a library collection of rare wines.
Emerald Hill often features in Singaporean literature, and provides the setting for some of the short stories by the writer Goh Sin Tub. Stella Kon’s play Emily of Emerald Hill is set in one of houses built in 1902. It was one of the bigger houses on Emerald Hill, with two tennis courts and a later front lawn but later pressed up against new apartment blocks.
But I also wanted to find out more about the original proprietor of Emerald Hill, William Cuppage, his Irish roots, and why he gave Irish names to his properties in Singapre, and whether he kept in touch with his family links back in Ireland.
More of that research in the days to come, I hope.
