A conservation shophouse is not a wall you simply roll out. The facade at 41 Kerbau Road carries moulded plaster pilasters and foliate capitals, bands of majolica tile, arched fanlights, timber louvred shutters and a decorative eaves comb — and every one of those elements wants a different approach, a different brush and a steady hand at the boundary between colours. The colours themselves do a lot of work here: jade and oxblood, sky blue and yellow, each held to its own moulding without bleeding into the next.
The access is the other half of the story. There is no room to stand a tower over a working five-foot way, so the high work was done off ropes — a main line and a back-up, harness, helmet and pails hung off the hip, moving down the face of the building and cutting in by hand as the work went. It lets us reach the parapet, the eaves and the upper pilasters of a heritage frontage without closing the street below or bolting scaffold into protected fabric.
Have a shophouse or a heritage facade that needs attention? Talk to us — access and colour are both part of the conversation.
