Most Singaporeans know Mohamed Sultan Road as the strip that briefly burned bright in the late 1990s — the bars, the clubs, the queues outside Madame Wong’s and dbl O. By 2005 the party had moved on. Most of the buildings stayed.
That’s the part of the story worth telling. Long before the clubs, and now decades after they faded, Mohamed Sultan Road has been a stretch of two- and three-storey shophouses built in the early 1900s — a residential, commercial, working street whose original character is still visible in the cornices and shuttered upper windows if you stop and look up. This is the road my father has painted from memory more than once, drawn to the same thing he was drawn to in Chinatown and Kampong Glam: the version of Singapore that exists in the structures left standing after the people who built them are long gone.
The Street’s Original Character
Mohamed Sultan Road runs roughly 800 metres from River Valley Road down to the Singapore River. It was laid out in the late 19th century and named after Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor, whose lineage was tied to the founding of modern Singapore in 1819. The shophouses that line both sides of the road were built mostly between 1900 and 1930, in the late-Transitional and Late Shophouse architectural styles — narrow frontages, deep interiors, ornate plaster mouldings on the second-storey façades, and the five-foot way running continuously along the ground floor.
For most of the 20th century, this was a quiet residential street. Families lived above the shops. The ground floors were a mix of provision stores, coffee shops, tailors, and small trades. The river end of the road connected directly to the working godowns of Robertson Quay, which until the 1980s were active warehouses moving rice, spices, and rubber up and down the Singapore River.
None of this is dramatic. That’s the point. Most of pre-redevelopment Singapore was exactly this — ordinary streets, modest buildings, working families. The drama came later, when these neighbourhoods were either cleared away entirely or transformed into something almost unrecognisable. Mohamed Sultan Road got the second treatment.
The Nightlife Decade (and Why It’s a Footnote)
Between roughly 1995 and 2003, Mohamed Sultan Road became Singapore’s premier nightlife strip. The shophouses were converted into clubs, bars, and lounges. The street drew crowds nightly. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the scene moved on — to Clarke Quay, to Boat Quay, eventually to the rooftops at Marina Bay.
What’s interesting about the nightlife era is how little it changed the buildings themselves. The shophouses were too well-protected by conservation status to be demolished or significantly altered. When the clubs left, the architecture was still there, mostly intact. Today the street is again largely residential and commercial — design studios, small restaurants, boutique offices — operating inside the same shophouse shells that the original residents would still recognise.
This is one of the things my father finds compelling about Singapore. The skin of the city changes constantly. The bones, in a few protected places, stubbornly survive.
What’s Worth Documenting
For an artist drawn to old Singapore — the specific buildings, the colour of the brickwork after a tropical rain, the way late afternoon light hits the shutters — Mohamed Sultan Road remains a working subject. The Late Shophouse style here is distinct from the more famous examples in Chinatown or Joo Chiat. The plaster ornamentation is restrained. The proportions are quieter. There’s less of the highly decorative Peranakan influence you find in Emerald Hill or Koon Seng Road. What you have instead is a kind of disciplined residential vernacular that’s harder to romanticise and, for that reason, more honest.
My father’s watercolour studies of streets like this one don’t try to dramatise. They document. The buildings as they are. The light as it falls. The way the road bends gently toward the river. The kind of detail that gets lost when the only photographs of a place are from the nightlife era — bright lights, crowds, a single moment of activity that wasn’t representative of the 90 years that came before or the 20 years that came after.
That’s the version of Mohamed Sultan worth painting. It’s also the version that quietly persists if you walk the street today on a Tuesday afternoon.
The Shophouses in Detail
If you walk Mohamed Sultan Road from the River Valley end, the architectural sequence is worth slow attention:
The first stretch — closer to River Valley Road — is dominated by Late Shophouse-style buildings, three storeys with restrained Classical motifs on the upper façades. Pilasters frame the windows, with simple capitals at the top. The plasterwork is mostly painted in muted colours now, though originally it would have been left in natural lime-wash tones or finished in deeper reds and ochres.
The middle stretch shows more Transitional-style buildings, two storeys, with arched windows on the second floor and decorative jack-roof tiles above. These are the buildings most easily mistaken for “generic” shophouses by a casual observer. In fact, they’re a specific design vocabulary — the cornice details, the spacing of the windows, the moulding profiles are all features of a particular period in Singapore’s building history.
The river end, closer to Robertson Quay, has a few more pragmatic, less ornamental buildings, originally serving the warehouse and working trades of the riverside. Some of these have been heavily modified. A few retain their original shutters and timber frames.
The whole street is a study in restraint — Singapore’s domestic architecture before the colonial showpieces of Orchard Road and the civic grandeur of Empress Place.
How My Father Approaches Streets Like This
When my father paints a street like Mohamed Sultan, he typically works from memory — long after walking the area, processing what stayed with him, leaving out the noise. The watercolours that result aren’t photographic. They’re closer to architectural elegies — capturing the proportions, the rhythm of the windows, the way one building leans slightly toward the next, the specific yellow-green of Singapore’s tropical light filtered through the verandahs.
The technique matters here. Watercolour is the right medium for documenting these buildings precisely because it can’t be too precise. The slight bleed of pigment into wet paper mirrors the way these buildings have weathered into the streetscape over a century of monsoons and humidity. A photograph fixes a moment. A watercolour absorbs decades.
His archive of streets like this — Mohamed Sultan, Ann Siang Hill, Smith Street, the lanes off Telok Ayer — sits alongside the more famous scenes (the Singapore River, the bridges, the Chinatown views). These are the quieter pieces. They’re often the ones that resonate longest with buyers who actually grew up in or near these neighbourhoods.
Walking the Road Today
If you want to see Mohamed Sultan Road as it really is, walk it on a weekday afternoon. Skip the nightlife framing. Look up at the second-storey windows. Notice the proportions. Notice where the original tiles have been replaced and where they haven’t. Walk it once in the dry season and once during the monsoon — the buildings look different in different light.
It’s a small street. You can cover it in 20 minutes. But it’s representative of a thousand quieter streets that used to define Singapore before redevelopment — most of which no longer exist. Mohamed Sultan does, mostly. That’s worth more than the nightlife memory.
If You’re Interested in the Heritage
The eArtSingapore archive includes a number of framed watercolour scenes documenting old Singapore streets and shophouse architecture. The closest match in feeling to Mohamed Sultan’s quieter character would be the framed print collection, which covers the heritage scenes my father has documented across six decades. Each print is reproduced from the original watercolour in his archive, archival-printed, and locally framed in Singapore.
For visitors who want the heritage story but not a framed piece, the heritage notebooks and bookmarks feature the same scenes in smaller, gift-friendly formats. The full archive is at eartsingapore.com.
If you grew up nearby — if Mohamed Sultan Road or River Valley or the streets toward Tiong Bahru were part of your earlier Singapore — these pieces are worth seeing.
A Note on the Source Material
The historical details in this article are drawn from a combination of personal documentation, the National Heritage Board’s published records on Mohamed Sultan Road’s conservation status, and direct observation by my father over six decades. Where historical claims are made about the road’s pre-war character, they reflect the architectural and social conditions documented in URA conservation reports and corroborated by long-time residents of the area. The watercolour archive itself dates the artist’s own studies of the street to multiple sittings between 1968 and 2002.
— Ronn Loy
Founder, eArtSingapore
