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Edit No.33

Singapore

Fumu · Raffles Singapore · Atelier KAI · Casa Mori · Nowhere Baths

Fumu bespoke shoes and wooden lasts arranged on the workshop floor in Singapore

Edit No.33 begins in Ubi, where Tor Cheng Yao makes shoes by hand after nearly a decade learning the craft in Japan.

At Fumu, bespoke work takes around 130 hours for a pair. A made-to-order collection asks how much of that craft can support a lasting shoemaking business in Singapore.

Raffles has occupied another kind of Singapore address since 1887. Its white arcades and suites carry the city’s history, but the question is how a protected monument still works as a hotel today.

Atelier KAI is a one-person leather workshop in Paya Lebar, where Philip Chuah makes watch straps to order. His months-long queue asks how individual craft can stay accessible in an expensive collecting habit.

At Casa Mori in Dempsey, Willin Low and José Alonso put Singaporean flavours and Spanish cooking in the same kitchen. The dishes that work best make each tradition more vivid rather than trying to merge them into something anonymous.

At Nowhere Baths, also in Dempsey, the team behind Palm Ave Float Club turns from solitary floatation to communal bathing. A former barrack offers two hours of heat, cold, trees and nothing to accomplish.

In this edit

Warm communal bathing pools beneath circular skylights at Nowhere Baths in Dempsey

Wellness

Nowhere Baths — The Case for Doing Nothing

Singapore rarely encourages you to do nothing. Trains arrive, lifts open, food appears, meetings begin — and even wellness now comes with a purpose attached: recover faster, sleep better, live longer. Then there is Nowhere.

Casa Mori dining room with terracotta walls, greenery and a curved central bar

Place

Casa Mori — When Fusion Becomes Its Own Cuisine

Put the chef who coined Mod-Sin in a kitchen with the chef behind one of Singapore's better Spanish restaurants, and the obvious risk is a menu of jokes. What arrives instead is a set of dishes where one tradition keeps revealing something useful about the other.

A watch fitted with a blue Atelier KAI leather strap on a woven table beside the water

Product

Atelier KAI — Why Watch Collectors Wait Six Months for a Strap

Watch collecting is an expensive habit with very few affordable entry points. Atelier KAI is one of them — and the waiting list is currently around six months.

The white colonial façade of Raffles Hotel Singapore, with its central entrance and red-tiled roof

Living

Raffles Singapore — The Hotel That Became the City's Memory

Some hotels become associated with a city. Raffles has had long enough to become entangled with one — and the more interesting question is what remains when you look past the mythology and actually stay there.

Fumu bespoke shoes and wooden lasts arranged on the workshop floor in Singapore

Product

Fumu — The Shoemaker Who Brought the Craft Home

Singapore produces plenty of economists. Bespoke shoemakers are harder to find — which is why a UCL economics graduate who spent most of a decade in Japanese workshops, and now makes shoes by hand in an industrial unit in Ubi, is worth paying attention to.

Questions

What is in Edit No.33?
Fumu, a bespoke shoemaker in Ubi; Raffles Singapore, the historic hotel at 1 Beach Road; Atelier KAI, a maker of bespoke watch straps; Casa Mori, a Singaporean-Spanish restaurant; and Nowhere Baths, a communal bathhouse at Dempsey.
Where is Fumu?
Fumu works from an appointment-only studio at Oxley Bizhub, 61 Ubi Road 1, Singapore.
Where is Raffles Singapore?
Raffles stands at 1 Beach Road in Singapore’s Civic District.
Where is Atelier KAI?
Philip Chuah works from an appointment-only studio in the Paya Lebar and Eunos area; the exact address is not published.
Where is Casa Mori?
Casa Mori is at 11 Dempsey Road, #01-17, Singapore 249673.
Where is Nowhere Baths?
Nowhere Baths is at 14A Dempsey Road, Singapore 249669.