Shophouse

Early next year, me and my husband will be renovating our shophouse. There might be some of you who wonders, what the heck is a shophouse?? I myself had never heard of it before I lived in Malaysia. A shophouse is a type of building that can be found in a few different places in Southeast Asia. The characteristics of the buildings is that it is kind of like row houses, stuck together with several other buildings and that it has a very narrow and small frontage with a deep rear. From the front the building thus looks quite small, even though they in many cases covers an area of around 160 square meters. Since most buildings have two floors, a total living space of a shophouse is about 300 square meters! The reason why the frontage are so small is because the people who built them wanted to avoid paying a lot of tax. At the time when they were built, people had to pay tax according to the width of the frontage, not according to the total land area. Today, the buildings in Georgetown that are classified as shophouses is on the UNESCO's World Heritage List. Since our shophouse is located within the core zone of Georgetown, we must renovate it according to its original appearance. This applies to both the frontage and the interior. But since we are going to use our shophouse both as a residence and as venue for my Swedish café, we will of course also put a bit of a Swedish touch on it.