The Disco Next Door

Posted on 9 February 2014 by christao408

In the more than five years that we have lived in our medium-sized condo, we have seen the 1950s house next door transition from being an Indian restaurant to K-Pop nightclub. Now it is set to make its next metamorphosis and become a community mall.

The house, as you can see in this borrowed picture above, was a beautiful “tropical modern” style, very common in this neighborhood which was, in the 1950s, a fashionable place for well-off families to build their weekend “country” home. Of course, back then this area of Bangkok was truly on the outskirts of town. When we arrived a half-decade ago, it was a contemporary Indian restaurant that didn’t ever seem busy but did do a good job preserving the architecture of the building.

Then about a year ago, we were informed it was going to become a “the world’s first K-Pop pub”. Much to the consternation of our residents, a new tenant built an exterior shell around the house and turned it into this gaudy sight. Our condo’s management, along with other nearby residents, used all available legal channels to block their operation and ultimately, they opened only a handful of nights before shutting down. Part of me wonders whether it was ever actually meant to be a legitimate business, as the idea of putting a pub in the midst of a residential area was ill-conceived from the start.

Recently, construction has started again. The exterior of the pub has been pulled down and you can see that the old house remains. After a week or two of initial curiosity, we were finally informed what will be built there.

The new space will be a “community mall” – the term used locally to describe these smaller-scale open air shopping centers that may have at most one or two dozen shops, a limited amount of parking, and restaurants and light retail.

Quite a number exist within a five- to ten-minute walk from our condo, so I’m not sure what the need is, but I suppose it is a better use of the space than a K-Pop nightclub. According to the plans, the original house will still be incorporated in some way, although from these two elevations, I don’t see where.

Anyhow, that’s what’s happening next door. How are things where you are?

Tim Ho Wan at Olympian 2

Posted on 12 January 2014 by christao408

One of my regular stops in Hong Kong is dim sum at Tim Ho Wan. The Michelin star recognized restaurant has opened several branches in the past few years and the original hole-in-the-wall Mongkok branch closed last year due to rent increases. On the most recent visit, we dined at the newest Tim Ho Wan branch at the Olympian 2 complex in Kowloon.

The new location is a bit of a challenge to find, as it is an exterior restaurant and so you enter the interior of the mall from the MTR system and then have to find your way outside and around the building. Not too difficult, though.

The interior of this branch is larger and brighter than any of the others, which means that the wait (which can be an hour or more at some locations like the Airport Express station at IFC) is much more reasonable. The four of us were seated in about fifteen minutes. The other benefit of the bright lighting is that pictures can much more easily be taken!

Speaking of which…

On the left are steamed pork spareribs with black bean sauce. On the right are steamed beancurd skin rolls filled with meat and vegetables.

On the left is steamed rice with chicken and Chinese sausage. On the right are pan-fried daikon radish cakes.

On the left are the famous baked buns with barbecue pork – these I could eat several orders of. On the right are deep fried glutinous rice dumplings filled with minced meat. Hard to tell from the outside but both were filled with lots of delicious food.

On the left is an interesting dish: quail eggs in dumpling wrappers! On the right is glutinous rice wrapped in a typical “bao” bread and steamed.

I didn’t take pictures of everything because dim sum just doesn’t photograph all that well. But we found the food to still be of a very high quality both in terms of ingredients and preparation. Dishes arrived quickly and service was efficient, if not particularly friendly.

In the future, this is the location I’ll return to for great dim sum while in Hong Kong.

New Tawn C Flagship Store in the Works

Posted on 10 September 2013 by christao408

Just over a year after opening his first boutique at the Central Chidlom department store, Tawn is close to opening his first flagship TAWN C store at Gaysorn Plaza mall in Bangkok. This stand-alone store will offer him greater control over the space compared to the boutique in the department store. He will have a locking front door, the ability to play his own music, and won’t have employees of other brands traipsing through his space on their way to and from the stock room.

The design for the store was done by our designer friend Ble, who designed the boutique and our condo, too. The feel of the space will be very modern but sophisticated, with walls divided into large pixels with molding. It should be very nice.

At this point, the hope is that the store is ready to open next week. The picture above is from a week ago. The big question is whether the carpet is ready for installation on time. I suggested that Tawn should do a photo shoot with his models in hard hats in the construction zone of his store. He didn’t think that was a good idea.

Terminal 21: Mall as Airport

Posted on 4 December 2011 by christao408

In early November, a new mall opened in Bangkok. Terminal 21, located adjacent to the Asoke Skytrain station along Sukhumvit Road, is a 9-story mall with 20 stories of serviced apartments and office space above the mall. What sets this mall apart is that it is themed as an airport.

By an “airport theme” I mean that there are many airport motifs throughout the complex. These range from information boards that looks like the digital “arrivals” and “departures” flight information displays you see at an airport, to the escalator signage looking like they indicate the directions to different gates, to each floor being themed after a different international city.

“Departure for Level 3” reads the sign above the long escalator that ascends from the mezzanine floor to a point halfway up the mall. Given its fantastic location, the mall has been crowded since its opening several weeks ago, filled mostly with local sightseers, much like the international airport was when it first opened.

Floors include Tokyo (left), Istanbul, Rome, and Paris (right) with each floor decorated in a manner meant to evoke the feel of the city. Lots of visitors are stopping to take pictures with these decorative items, leading to the likely chance that you will walk through the frame of someone’s picture at some point or another. Even the mall security and cleaning staff are uniformed appropriately for the floor on which they work. Yes, that means that on the Paris floors the staff cleaning the toilets are dressed like French maids.

The San Francisco floor has a miniature Golden Gate bridge spanning an atrium. The only shops on this floor are restaurants, which seems appropriate for a city well-known for its food. I’m not sure that the selection of restaurants would necessarily do the City by the Bay proud, though.

With its location adjacent to both the Skytrain and subway stations, Terminal 21 is positioned at a literal crossroads of Bangkok, accessible to customers from many corners of the city. The mall looks like it has targeted the middle of the market: there are many popular stores but no high-end ones and there are also a large number of smaller boutiques featuring local independent businesses. Compared to other malls in the city, it is not nearly as fancy as Central Childlom or Siam Paragon but is much nicer than Platinum or MBK. I suspect it will be a winning formula.

The thing that I find terribly ironic, though, is that in a city with an airport that has been criticized for being too much of a mall (the picture above is of the actual airport, not Terminal 21), we end up having a new mall that has an airport theme. To compare the two:

Suvarnabhumi Airport	Terminal 21 Mall
High end shopping	Local boutiques
Took 4 years after opening to get rail service, which is expensive and inconvenient	Served by rail service from the first day on both the Skytrain and Subway lines
Easily mispronounced Sanskrit name	Easily pronounced English name
Confusing signage and endless moving sidewalks	Clear signage and quick escalators
Intolerable waits at immigration	Breeze through metal detector at entrance
Insufficient toilets, often dirty	Plentiful toilets cleaned by women in French maid outfits

Terminal 21 Nears Completion

Posted on 29 March 2011 by christao408

In November 2009 I first wrote about the construction of a new mall at the northwest corner of Sukhumvit and Asoke roads called Terminal 21. I visited the subject again in February of this year as part of an entry about the profusion of malls being built along Sukhumvit Road. In the weeks since, I’ve stopped by the site, which is easily visible from the outbound platform of the Asoke BTS Skytrain station, to view the last steps of construction.

Since the mall is literally right next to both the Skytrain station (elevated) and the subway station, it should benefit from easy access. But, in a city with strong sunlight, heavy rain showers, and lots of traffic, the more convenient and enclosed you can make that connection, the better.

Because of that, one of the things I’ve been observing and thinking about is how the main entry area (shown above) will connect with the two rail stations. You can see the long concrete deck that will be the main entry area, wrapped in green construction netting. One entrance is on the left, outlined in red metal beams, and the other is at the right end where there is a bit of a canopy being constructed.

On the west end of the deck, I can easily see how a bridge might be built to connect to the Skytrain station, which has blue-covered stairs seen on the left of the picture. In this picture, taken a few weeks ago, I anticipated the potential bridge with orange lines.

Sure enough, by last week they were pouring the concrete reinforcements for the bridge and I imagine in another week or so they will be laying the beams for the bridge. This will lead directly to the entrance of the Skytrain station, which I fear is a bit small to deal with the amount of passengers that may be passing through the space.

The more uncertain question is what they will do with the other entrance to the mall. In the picture shown above, taken a few weeks ago, they were demolishing the sales office for the mall and I anticipated (in orange lines) that maybe a bridge would be built connecting to the escalators that descend to the subway. The escalators are in the building with the bright blue roof that has one red segment. While some re-jiggering of the wheelchair ramp in that area would be necessary, it seemed to be an easy way to get people directly to the subway, short of a tunnel leading into the station itself.

After they demolished the former sales office and finished off the edge of the entry deck, it is no more clear what they will be doing. Certainly it will be some sort of bridge, but how it connects to anything else remains a mystery. Complicating matters further, there is a narrow alley you see in the photo above. This space contains a small shrine that belongs to the Asoke fresh market, located in the building with the dingy white-washed wall. Any bridge connecting to the escalators to the subway would have to cross over this alley. I guess there is little to do but wait and see.

One other thing that caught my eye: there seems to be a “moat” built around the edge of the mall. The other day there was quite a bit of water flowing down it. Not sure if this is part of the drainage system and will be covered with grilles or what.

The other night while waiting for the train after my Thai lesson, I noticed they had the interior lights on for the first time. It may be a bit hard to tell, but the interior is largely finished. They are laying the tiles on the main floor and most of the shop entrances are decorated already. I think they will be open in the next few months.

Not that far away from Terminal 21 – in fact, just two subway stops north along Asoke/Ratchadapisek Road – There is another mall being built. This is Central Plaza Rama 9. There is an additional development that is supposed to happen behind it – a large four-tower condo complex. In fact, the developer was floating the idea of building a monorail that would go down Ratchadapisek Road (to the right in the picture above) and connect with the Airport Rail Link terminal at Makkasan.

The view above is looking east from atop Fortune Town IT Mall, with the Thailand Cultural Center off to the left and Rama IX road following the bridge on the right. Pardon the inexpert job done stitching three photos together to create this faux fisheye lens effect.

A Profusion of Malls along Sukhumvit Road

Posted on 10 February 2011 by christao408

Is it perhaps some sort of sibling rivalry? Listening to the leaders of Bangkok, one could be forgiven for thinking that they were feeling a little bit of envy of their better manicured regional sibling, Singapore. Like listening to a youngster who both admires and despises his older brother, I chuckle each time an idea is mooted that seems to be chasing after Singapore: Let’s build a giant Ferris wheel by the Chao Phraya River! Let’s relocate street vendors into clean, well lighted facilities! Let’s build an endless chain of malls from Siam Square to Sukhumvit!

Not that there is anything wrong with these ideas – well, except the Ferris wheel – but it seems that our civic leaders should find the confidence to just say what we all know to be true: We’re not Singapore, we never will be, and that’s perfectly fine. After all, if we were so much like Singapore, we would lose a large chunk of our tourists: the Singaporeans on holiday from their overly-staid city state.

One area of the sibling rivalry in which we are making progress is the building of malls. Singapore may well have its Orchard Road, but we have our (admittedly difficult for visitors to pronounce and often taken over by protesters) Ratchaprasong Shopping District, stretching roughly from MBK and Siam Square on the west to Central Childlom on the east.

You could logically extend the shopping district along the same street (which confusingly changes names from Rama I to Phloenchit to Sukhumvit along the way), bypassing the rather frightening Nana district and ending up at Asoke and Phrom Phong, which are seeing the development of their own new malls.

Let’s take a look at some of that development.

Phloenchit Area

In the Phloenchit area, which stretches from the Chitlom to Phloen Chit Skytrain stations, there are three new developments. In addition to these new developments, the reconstruction of Central World Plaza, which suffered severe fire damage in the wake of protests that were broken up on May 19 of last year, looks to be proceeding on pace for reopening by year’s end.

The largest new project, long discussed but finally announced this week, is Central Embassy, built by Central Retail Corporation, owners of the Central World Plaza and Central Chidlom properties, among others.

Central Embassy

Built between Chidlom and Phloen Chit stations on nine rai (14,400 square meters) of land bought from the British Embassy, this 37-story multi-use development will contain 70,000 square meters of retail on eight floors along with a 222-room luxury Park Hyatt hotel. Its design will feature a unique “twisting ribbon” that should add another landmark to the city’s skyline.

A view of the Central Embassy project property looking west towards Central Chidlom (white tower on the right and the shorter brown and green building to its left). Buildings on the British Embassy grounds are in the lower right of the picture. The angle showed here is equivalent to looking at the model in the previous picture from the far right side of that picture.

When it is complete in late 2013, the Central Embassy project will have an integrated facade with Central Chidlom, including a bridge connecting the two. Central Chidlom will reportedly be renovated so the two properties have a consistent look, giving Central Retail Corporation a second large mall (along with Central World Plaza) in less than a one-kilometer stretch of Phloenchit Road.

Also in this neighborhood, not 100 meters to the east, is a large stretch of empty land next to Phloen Chit station. (Pardon the poor job stitching two photos together.) This property has undergone fitful attempts at development over the years, with constructions workers coming in from time to time to clear the land of vegetation and put up construction fencing, only to do no further work.

This week the process started again with the clearing of an old building at the front of the property which had served as the sales office for whatever project had initially been started before the Asian economic crisis more than a decade ago. No signage has been posted yet indicating what the development will contain, but based on the neighborhood and size of the property, it seems likely that a mixed-use building with retail, office, and possibly condominiums or hotel rooms will be built.

Directly across the Skytrain tracks from this property is the Park Ventures Ecoplex, a combination office building and 33-story hotel that will be finished this year. Once all these properties are complete, all the free land at the Ploenchit-Witthayu (Wireless Road) junction will be developed, baring the demolition of any older properties.

Sukhumvit Area

Follow Ploenchit Road east a few Skytrain stops and you get to the middle of Sukhumvit Road, an area populated with expats and well-heeled Thais. Since 1997, The Emporium, owned by the Mall Group (part-owners of Siam Paragon), has been the main shopping center for this area. In fact, it was the first mall to have a direct connection to a Skytrain station, something that has helped it continue to be popular even in the wake of the explosion of malls around Siam and Ratchaprasong.

The Emporium’s retail monopoly of the mid-Sukhumvit neighborhood is set to end this year as the new Terminal 21 project (previous entry about it) finishes construction at the junction of Sukhumvit and Asoke Roads. Featuring a nine-story mall including a cinema and 40,000 square meters of retail space, the project will also have 145,000 square meters of office space and a 20-story serviced apartment.

In the last few weeks, another challenger to Emporium (and the Ratchaprasong-centrism of Bangkok’s retail scene) has appeared. Directly across the Skytrain tracks from Emporium, construction has started on an extremely large property. No signage has been posted indicating what will be built there, but given the location it is hard to imagine that it won’t include a large amount of retail along with either a hotel or condo, or both. (Edit: I just heard today from two reputable sources that this will officially by an expansion of Emporium’s footprint, colloquially called “Emporium 2”.)

There is also another large project two stations to the east at Ekkamai. Edit: this will reportedly be an IT mall.

Rama IV / Sathorn

The final development, retail-wise, is that the Lumpini Night Bazaar, a popular nighttime shopping area located across from Lumpini Park, has finally closed. This property, owned by the Crown Property Bureau, is slated for a multi-use development by the Central Retail Corporation. If you look on the first map in this entry, you will see that the Lumpini development is just down the street from the new Central Embassy project.

The closure and development of the Night Bazaar was tied up in legal action for the past two years, but after the calendar turned to 2011 its doors were finally shut and the bulldozers have moved in. Look for another large mall project to appear along this stretch of Rama IV Road in the next two years or so.

Conclusions

What do all these developments mean? It seems safe to say that the dominance of the Siam-Ratchaprasong area in the shopping scene will be challenged as development moves eastward on the Sukhumvit Skytrain line. If anything, this should help ease congestion, both in terms of the number of people as well as the number of vehicles, that crowd that already crowded area.

The real, and as yet unanswered, question is whether Bangkok needs so much retail space. Tourism growth has slowed over the last few years thanks to political instability and other concerns. It would seem that the local population’s buying power has limited ability to grow, too. If that is the case, one can only imagine that we will be awash in a glut of malls and in that, we will be able to proudly hold our own against Singapore.

Bank in a Garden

Posted on 30 August 2010 by christao408

Success in business is often a matter of degrees, finding that unique niche that sets you apart from the competition in a way that is meaningful to potential customers, but isn’t gimmicky. In the category of “I’m not sure if this is cool or silly” I present for your consideration, the bank in a garden.

For their 1,000th branch, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand’s oldest bank, created what they are calling a “bank in a garden”, a themed branch that has just opened in the newly remodeled Paradise Park mall on the city’s rapidly expanding eastern flank.

Paradise Park, which was previously known as Seri Center, has undergone a complete makeover and as part of it, SCB decided to make a big splash in keeping with the new mall’s “Oasis of Eastern Bangkok” theme.

I’m all for innovation and certainly banking, which is still largely done in person here in Thailand (which explains why they have 1,000 branches!), is a task that will benefit from nearly anything that can make it more pleasant. But I’m not sure that artificial grass and artificial shrubs and wicker lawn furniture is going to help. Especially in a few months when the fake leaves and blades of grass start to fall (or be pulled) off and the greenery starts to have some bare patches.

What are your thoughts? Would you like to have a bank in a garden at your local branch?

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

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