The stair at the back of the house

I was taught the shophouse the way every architecture student is. The party walls that carry the structure. The airwell that draws light and air down through a deep and narrow plan. The five-foot way at the front. I could name the styles and place them in their periods.

Nobody taught me the staircase. For years I assumed, the way most people do, that the concrete spiral at the back of the shophouse had always been there, built with the house. I was wrong, and I only found that out recently, reading about a piece of design almost nobody bothers to write about. Being wrong about it is what made me want to make something from it.

There is a lane in Little India, off Chander Road, lined with them. Two staircases face each other across it, three storeys tall, standing over the bins and the parked bicycles and the gas cylinders stacked against the wall. People go there to photograph the stairs. Almost no one walks in knowing why the stairs are there.

What I found out is that they were never part of the original building. The shophouses came first, built back to back, with no lane between them. The lane was cut in later. An amendment to the municipal ordinance in 1909 required it, and over the decades that followed the backs of the shophouses were opened up, row by row, for two reasons. Firefighting access, between buildings that were essentially stacked timber. And sanitation, with sewers run under the lane and waste carried out by hand from ports set into the rear wall, which went on into the late 1980s.

Cutting the lane took land from the back of each house. The authorities rebuilt the rear walls in compensation, and the staircase came with that rebuilding. A second way out in a fire, required by the same rules that required the lane. It was fitted onto a building that had already stood for years.

That was the part I had missed, and it is easy to miss, because the staircase gives nothing away. You can stand in the lane and feel certain it belongs, that it was always there. It reads as original. It is not.

It blends without hiding. A concrete spiral three storeys tall hides from nothing. It blends because it was built in the same language as everything around it. The same material, the same weight, the same way of doing things, by people solving a problem with what they had and no more than that. Nobody marked it as new. Nobody pointed to the fix. The restraint was not a decision anyone made. It was just what the work was, before the back of a building became somewhere you might express something.

That is what I keep coming back to. Function, solved in a shared language, by someone who was not trying to be seen. Function without ego. Do it well enough and the solution stops looking like a solution. It looks like it was always part of the place. People come to recognise it and to love it without ever learning it was an answer to a problem, because it never asked them to.

Storey Forms started here. The first piece takes the shophouse staircase and turns it into something for a shelf or a table.

There is an inversion in it that I want to be honest about. The staircase was a way down and out, made for the worst day. The object is the reverse. It is lit from the base, and the light climbs the spiral toward the top. The stair sent people away from the building. The object brings the eye back.

The object is also not a modest thing, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It is lit and placed and built to be looked at, which is everything the staircase was not. That is the whole reason it exists. The staircase spent a century asking for no attention at all. The object is here to give it some, and to send a few people down a lane they would have walked straight past.

Before anything leaves the studio, I ask whether it earns its place or only takes one up. The staircase earns it, and has done for a hundred years without a word from anyone. I don’t know that the object will manage the same. But that is what I am holding it to.

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Back Lane Stair, the first piece in Storey Forms, launches on 7 August 2026, ahead of National Day. The Inner Room gets first access on 5 August. Join here